Steve Wheeler : Activity

Learning without Limits

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:22:00 GMT

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/03/learning-without-limits.html

We are gearing up to host the 4th Plymouth e-Learning Conference in a few weeks time, and with over 200 delegates already registered, and more than 80 presentations, workshops and demonstrations on offer, it promises to be a memorable event. But even before this event is put to bed, we already have the theme and title for PELC 2010. And yes, the eagle-eyed will note that I have borrowed a little from one of my heroes, Sir Arthur C. Clarke. The first call for papers for PELC 2010 will be out soon with the eye catching space motif. The full title for the 5th Conference which will be held in Plymouth on 8-9 April 2010, is 'Learning without Limits: Facing the Challenges', and here's your first sight of the conference theme:

The theme for the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference – Learning without Limits - will address the notion of anytime, anyplace learning. It will highlight the growing number of contexts in which learning takes place. We will focus on the challenges and opportunities brought by formal and informal learning, social networks and personal technologies, mobile learning and innovative on-campus education, virtual and real teaching & learning scenarios, and how teachers and learners are harnessing the power and potential of new and emerging technologies.

As in previous years the conference welcomes proposals for papers, workshops, symposia and demonstrations from across all sectors of education and training, focused on topic areas such as:

Emerging Learning Technologies
Classroom Learning Technology
New Pedagogies and Practices
Mobile Learning, Ambient and Pervasive Technologies
Games for Learning
3D Multi User Virtual Environments
Social Web and Social Networking
Multi-Media
Digital Literacy
Digital Identity

So, if you are not able to make this year's event, we hope to see you in Plymouth for 2010. Start writing your proposal now, and .... book early!

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Feeling the pinch .... again

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:19:00 GMT

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/03/feeling-pinch-again.html

Multi-touch screen technology is the way forward apparently. I can see just how persuasive this argument is when I look at my own iPhone and see all the possibilities. I picked up my wife's phone a few weeks back to call someone back, and forgot. Hers is not a touch screen phone, and I found myself trying to pinch gesture, in vain. How long will it be before other phones are going down the route of the iPhone?

Erik Klimczak, creative director of Clarity Consulting believes it won't be long. Second Light, the second generation of the Microsoft Surface Computing device is only a couple of years down the road, and as experience tells us, second generation devices are less buggy than the first versions, have a lot more support from manufacturers and user groups, and most importantly for the success of adoption, are a lot cheaper to buy. "Everything is moving to touch and multi-touch so you had better jump on that bandwagon," Klimczak said at a recent developers conference. It won't be long before we find out if he is correct.

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Is Twitter the Semantic Web?

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:31:00 GMT

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-twitter-semantic-web.html

Saw a blog post from Alan Cann over at the University of Leicester this evening which got me thinking. His post was entitled 'Twitter drives traffic to blogs and social networks', and in it he claims that Twitter is the semantic web. He has a great poem on his site called 'The Semantic Web will not be Televised' which expresses this idea perfectly.

Although the Semantic Web (Web 3.0?) is still somewhat ill-defined and there are disagreements over exactly what it is, or what it looks like, most people agree that elements of it at least, have been with us for some time. The key presumed attributes of the semantic web are its psuedo-intelligent predictive and filtering capabilities:

Back in 1999 Sir Tim Berners-Lee declared: "I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers."

This is a grand architectural design of course, most of which is not completely accessible to the average computer user. What we do understand however, is that 'intelligent agents' in software will enable computers to filter out what we don't want and push to us what we do want, based on our previous use of search engines, network transactions, etc.

In this context, Alan Cann is probably correct because Twitter can act as a network filter - still under the control of the user, with little intelligence built into it other than the choices of the user - but having a form of filtering capability beyond the user none-the-less. We are still some way off from truly intelligent ageants that predict accurately what you want, when you want it, in your current location. But Twitter is more than the glorified e-mail system many claim it to be. Twitter is certainly a huge step toward semantic prediction - it allows you to lock directly into and maintain your own personalised community of interest, where you can follow or un-follow who you wish, communicate across boundaries and push/pull information as you require it. It is only a small step from here to automated versions.

(Image source: yardflex.com)

YouTube is skill in music

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:19:00 GMT

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/03/youtube-is-skill-in-music.html

YouTube is blocking all music videos from its service in the UK from today, due to a disagreement with the Performing Right Society (PRS). YouTube has clashed with other media owners in the past too, and there seems to be no end to the disagreements that could be had between old and new media. Having been a full member of the PRS myself since 1984, I am of course, torn between the two viewpoints, as I can see the arguments for both sides. Forget about the very small percentage of mega-stars who earn an absolute fortune when they enjoy chart success with a string of number ones. Most musicians make a small living from royalties on the number of plays of their songs, and sometimes this is their only income.

I remember when I was a semi-professional musician, on a low income, and having spent a small fortune on amplification, instruments and lighting, trying to recoup some at least back from recording and selling my own songs (that's me pictured playing in 1983 with my trusty Gibson Les Paul). The initial outlay was alarming, with studio and production costs very steep. Travelling to gigs, marketing and upkeep of equipment and instruments was an ongoing hidden cost. It was an expensive business to be in.

On one occasion, a whole group of 'fans' came up to me after a gig and told me how much they enjoyed listening to the tracks I had released on cassette tape. There was a problem with this for me. You see, I had never released cassette tapes of those tracks, only vinyl disks, so the cassette tapes were illegal copies of my music. 'I think you probably owe me some money' I thought, but didn't say. 'Home taping is killing music' was a slogan probably originating somewhere in the bowels of the PRS. Now the mantra might be 'YouTube is killing music', but this would not be totally accurate, as there is strong evidence that playouts on YouTube and other social web sites can actually increase the sales and downloads of music. We are in a paradigm shift, as old and new media clashes. The question is not whether YouTube should be able to play these music videos. The only thing we really need to decide is how to get payments from playouts, whatever the medium, into the pockets of those hard working and very deserving musicians and songwriters.

What you see is what you get

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 09:42:00 GMT

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-you-see-is-what-you-get.ht

Human perception has been explained in many ways, from Decartes, through to the 'top-down' experiments of Richard Gregory, then J.J. Gibson's ecological 'bottom-up' model and a host of other theorists. Each clamours for our attention, attempting to explain the way we represent our version of reality inside our heads. The plain fact remains: What you see is what you get. You simply make your own interpretation of it, and believe what you want to believe. This is what allows illusionists and street 'magicians' such as David Blaine and Derren Brown to maintain their popular appeal.

Yesterday I took my second year teacher trainees over to our Virtual Immersion Cinema where for an hour they watched high resolution 3D images projected using a fish-eye lens onto the ceiling of the dome. There were a few inertia-sickness issues, but mercifully, there were no technicolour yawns. The wow factor was high though, and many were left afterwards with questions about how they could use such a facility to enhance the teaching of science, history, geography and other subject areas.

After this we went back to the classroom and I demonstrated the art of illusion using nothing more than a simple can of baked beans and my index finger. If you are sqeamish, don't watch this video. And please don't try this at home. You probably won't be insured.

Click To Play

Centre of the Twitterverse

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:02:00 GMT

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/03/centre-of-twitterverse.html

Yes, the Twitterverse is the name we give to the environment within which Twitter people do their stuff. All around the world, every minute of the day, someone, somewhere is tweeting something. It may be something trivial, or it may be something important - a link to a useful site everyone should know about, for example. Some people tweet to a small circle of friends. Others have a vast 'following' of thousands. Some, such as celebrities use Twitter merely as a broadcast 'send only' medium, to get their message across. They follow no-one or just a select few others, and I think that this approach is missing the point of Twitter.

You see, Twitter is one of the fastest growing social media for many reasons. But the most important reason is that Twitter can connect people to each other, and enable immediacy of communication. During an evening teaching session recently, with a group of novices, I sent out a tweet to ask those on Twitter to simply say 'hello'. The group of students were amazed that just a few minutes later, over 30 responses had come through, from all parts of the world.

We are increasingly connected to each other, sometimes through friends of friends, or even more tenuously than that, and Twitter is exemplifying the concept originally proposed by Stanley Milgram of 6 degrees of separation - that we are connected through each other to everyone else in the world via other people. Twitter makes these connections probably better than any other medium, and that includes the likes of Myspace and Facebook. It does it better because this microblog is easier, quicker to use and things are kept to a minimum (restricted to 140 characters only) and you need to follow someone to read their Twitter stream.

I was interested then yesterday to see that several visualisation tools have emerged recently amidst the plethora of third party Twitter tools. The 5K Twitter Browser by Neuro Productions places 'you' at the centre of your Twitterverse, with the most recent 16 twitter follows connected to you. Click onto any one of them and they become a second hub with their 16 most recent follows also connected. Then it gets complicated, because you can continue clicking ad nauseum, to see who else is connected to whom and whether there is a mutual connection. I'm not sure just how useful this tool is, or what it can be used for yet, but it is worth a look if you haven't seen it, just for a nice visual treat.

Oh, and by the way, the image above was generated using another online tool I have just discovered, known as the Parody Motivator Generator. If you have a spare minute or two, have a go with this too - it's great fun.

Once more with feeling....

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:16:00 GMT

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/03/once-more-with-feeling.html

Now I can take a breath and sit back (even if it's just for a few hours). The provisional programme for the 4th Plymouth e-Learning Conference is complete and has been posted onto the Conference Website. It's an exciting programme I think, and tops all the previous ones in both scope and depth. There are keynotes from Mike Blamires (Day 1) and Graham Attwell (Day 2) and an invited plenary presentation from Charles Oppenheim and Naomi Korn on Web2Rights. There are over 70 paper presentations dealing with such diverse subjects as using Web 2.0 tools in teaching (wikis, blogs, podcasting, Facebook, YouTube), papers on mobile technology, Second Life, the VLE vs the PLE debate, aggregation, transnational perspectives on e-learning, e-assessment and e-portfolios, audience response systems, collaborative content management, and even a paper on terrorism and the web! Delegates are attending from about 15 different countires as far away as Australia and New Zealand, as well as from all over Europe and the UK.

Tickets for the spectacular Conference Dinner, which will be held in the National Marine Aquarium on Plymouth's historic Barbican quayside are going fast. There will be 10 workshops presented over the two days (including ones on Twitter and mobile technologies) as well as some exciting leading edge demonstrations such as the 3D virtual immersion cinema. There will also be a full vendor exhibition across the two days. All this will take place in the amazing Roland Levinsky Building, in the heart of the university campus. Oh, and of course, there is the wonderful, non-fattening Devon Cream Tea on the afternoon of the final day. Throughout the event, delegates will be encouraged to twitter, blog and txt their thoughts, and we will aggregate all images, tweets etc, under the hashtag #pelc09. Should be fun. Looking forward to it. Come and join us. Hope you can make it.

Down to a 't'

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:03:00 GMT

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/03/down-to-t.html

Google Scholar is a very useful tool if you are in the business of research. It's also a nice surprise when you put your own name in and up come your own publications with all the citations listed beneath them. I was very pleased to see that one of the papers I co-wrote with Maged Boulos in 2007 has been cited 77 times. The paper was entitled The Emerging Web 2.0 Social Software and was published in Health Information and Libraries Journal. So I went through a few of the citations just to see what other researchers were saying about our article.

To my amusement, one author had cited me as Wheelert, S. Well, that's me all right, but I had never seen my surname spelt with a 't' on the end. My amusement turned to irritation however, when time after time, other citations also used the same spelling of my surname - Wheelert. In all Google showed 17 incidences of my name being remixed.

So I checked my birth certificate. No, I was born Wheeler. I checked my marriage certificate - something must have happened in the act of getting wed that changed my surname without my knowledge perhaps? No, that happened to my wife instead, so I was still Wheeler. Must have been the article then. No, in the original article we published, our names were spelt correctly too. So ..... it was obvious what had happened. Someone had cited my article and misspelled my name with an extra letter in it by mistake. Then others had come along, withour reading my original article and simply lifted the quotation out from the secondary article and had requoted the error in their own article. The error has spread virally. I'm not going to name and shame all the authors here, because that would be churlish - but you can check it out for yourself if you care to. Simply paste this reference into Google and you will see what I mean:

Boulos, K. & Wheelert, S. (2007) The emerging web 2.0 social software

Perhaps I should simply be happy that other people are quoting my publications, I hear you ask? Well, there is a deeper problem here, I retort. If this is happening to my work, how much more endemic is this practice out in the world of academia? How much of this copying and pasting gets past the reviewers? How potentially damaging is this practice to a) the integrity of academic research and b) the veracity and accuracy of what we read in academic journals?

Let me ask a question here. How many of us have actually read the work of Lev Vygotsky directly? And how many of us have quoted from his Mind in Society book without reading it? I did this once or twice myself, I must admit, before I realised my error. Are academic researchers becoming lazy in their literature reviews? And if this copying and pasting is a widespread practice, which I suspect it is, how can we without being hypocrites, expect our students to be more diligent than us? I guess that's academia down to a 't'.

(Image source: www.education.asu.edu)

Seven deadly spams

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:23:00 GMT

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/02/seven-deadly-spams.html

OK, so it was pure irony and I was having a laugh. My last post 'Twitter made my head explode' was just me letting off a little steam (the picture was a subtle clue). My head didn't really explode, and I don't really believe that overuse of the Internet leads to ADHD or autism, or that prolonged use of screen technologies might lead to diseases such as cerebral vascular accident (CVA or 'stroke') or the big 'C'. I was just having some fun at the expense of a few pompous scientific types who maybe should think more carefully before they commit their unsubstantiated ideas to press. But seriously, there are some potential dangers out there in the social network world. They are more social than physical though...

We have all heard about the employees who have lost their jobs for badmouthing their employers on their blogs. The case of the 'Petite Anglaise' - British worker Catherine Sanderson, who was sacked from her Paris job - is a classic one. She eventually won a court case against her former employers for wrongful dismissal. We don't often hear though, about those bright young things who have left university looking for high flying jobs, yet who cannot find good jobs. We don't hear how their potential employers trawl through Facebook and find images of them engaged in dubious or colourful activities. And then there's the thing we are all affected by: the spam that increasingly invades our e-mail accounts and social spaces. Patricia Wallace once said that the act of daily deleting spam is the psychological equivalent to 'weeding the garden.' It's annoying but necessary. Last month we all suffered a Twitter attack (keep taking the pills), where targeted users had their accounts hijacked, spam messages were sent out in their name, and others lost personal data.

Cloudmark is a company that services the social networking industry, policing its clients servers for spam. They recently released "the seven deadly sins of social networking spam." One of my favourite bloggers Robert X Cringely has expanded it a little in his own inimitable style. It's a real hoot, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did:

1) Dating spam. Sorry to break it to you, but "Sultry Svetlana," that 23-year-old hottie from the Ukraine who thinks you're fascinating, is really Ugly Ivan, a 46-year-old scammer from Minsk. Take a cold shower and forget about her.
2) Profile and IM lures. Suddenly, you're Mr. Popularity -- only your newfound friends want to lure you to a fake profile page or IM conversation, where they can steal your information. The moral: candy + strangers = bad news.
3) Redirection to dangerous sites. Uh oh, somebody has posted naughty pix of you at an external site -- better go look. No, you won't find naughty pix (at least, not of you), but you might get a drive-by malware infection.
4) Nigerian attacks. That same deposed foreign minister who wanted to share $35 million in embezzled funds with you on e-mail now wants to do it on Facebook. Let me know how that works out for you.
5) Fake jobs. A fantastic job opportunity awaits you. And if you're lucky, your new "employer" will only clean out your bank account and not steal your identity and/or get you arrested along with it.
6) Competitor social network lure. Lesser social networks may try to steal you away by posting comments on your page pretending to be from your friends. Is that pathetic or what?
7) Religion-based spam. Have you accepted the Alien King Rondelay as your one and true savior? Spammers may use social networking sites to convert users for various religions. God help us all.

Wow, who ever thought social networking could be so exciting?

(Image source: http://blog.smithsonianchannel.com/2008/09/19/spam-tastic/)

Twitter made my head explode

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:36:00 GMT

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2009/02/twitter-made-my-head-explode.ht

It's official. Facebook can give you cancer. Prolonged use of the Internet causes autism. ADHD. Heart disease. (And Twitter may make your head explode). Baroness 'Susan' Greenfield's recent comments in the House of Lords have caused no end of consternation. Her controversial claims are about the effect of computers on children's health. Greenfield seems to think that there may be links between autism and the prevalance of 'screen relationships' where kids interact with their peers predominantly online. Her basic premise is that the skills we draw upon when communicating face to face wither and die when we persist in technology mediated communication. She mentions body posture, vocal intonation, and even pheromones. To cap it all, the fragrant baroness suggests that prolonged use of screen technologies might be linked to a rise in ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). She is quoted as saying: "It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations." This she says, will lead to shorted attention spans and increased recklessness.

Other respected psychologists weigh in with similar opinions, including Dr Aric Sigman who suggests in the journal Biologist that 'a lack of face-to-face contact could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels and the function of arteries'. There is even a danger, he says of cancer, strokes, heart disease and dementia. There is no scientific evidence for this he warns, but lack of proof should not stop us from believing there are long term effects to exposure to social networking sites and other internet activity. Just because a women from Cancer Research UK dismisses the claims, doesn't mean we should ignore them. (Here's some video footage of a BBC TV Newsnight programme framing the debate).

After all, these scientists are above reproach and therefore they cannot be wrong, can they? Dr Ben Goldacre of Bad Science thinks they are both wrong. But what does he know? He runs his own blog so he must be biased. Perhaps Facebook does give you cancer! I must admit I am more that a little worried by these reports. For example, I am now worried that my mouse will give me a sexually transmitted disease, or that prolonged use of Twitter will cause my head to explode in a manner reminiscent of the movie 'Scanners'.

Well if all these very respected human scientists are telling us that children's health is at risk because of their use of screen technologies, I suppose we must believe them mustn't we? Eat manure, they tell us. Why? Because fifty billion flies can't be wrong.

(Image source: www.pro.corbis.com)