web 2.0 landscapes – difficult indeed!

We are running our course of selfdirecting with web 2.0 tools vol. 2
This time we have ‘green’ master students, and our course is their first try at master level.
If last year developing the tool landscapes seemed to be moderately difficult, then this year a strange idea is duplicating itself in the web. Personal landscape means for them – ‘my collection of tools’, and not ‘my landscape of information flow’. So, from 23 students we have received around 15 ‘tool collection’ images. I think that the main paradigm shift in web 2.0 thinking is, is starting to see ‘my collection of separate tools’ as ‘my distributed landscape‘ where i can coordinate information flows. Here is a little paradigm shift on its way, but still at half way. Text is describing mostly of what one can do with this tool, which is affordances for this student for performing some actions.
One example can be seen from here

super-peer network

Ideas from the ECTEL 07 presentation ‘A p2p framework for interacting with learning objects’ by Andrea Clematis et al.

I am using learning objects and i am recording my practices how i am using these objects.
And i will share my practices with my peers in the network who are using the objects as well.

Herman Maurer keynote at ECTEL07

Herman Maurer keynote
Tackling new problems in learning and elearning

He started his presentation with blaming plagiarism and the main message was not so much touching the topic of the keynote heading. But it was interesting in another way, bringing in the negative message about Google and Wikipedia.

We are in process by creating the reality by googling.

Plagiarism concerns: institutions, other organizations

We can use Google as a powerful tool to detect plagiarism.

From ‘papermills’: i would like to get a paper about web 2.0 teaching to send to the journal that has full rights 35 000 dollars was the offer (Maurer experiment)

Anti-plagiarism software: changes words with synonymes and the plagiarism detection tools will not find it out.
If we translate the paper from one language to another, it is plagiarized, but it cannot be detected.

I don’t care if the report is copied from another country, its nice if 20 000 euros was earned with 5 minutes by changing only few words.

We need international agreements what is allowed at data-mining.
Google is doing nothing illegal but it violates laws of data-mining.

Problems with Google and Wikipedia:
Google is invading privacy of persons and companies because of combined undertakings (Google earth etc.).
Google is the best detective agency in the world.

We are googling reality as Google and Wikipedia want to see it.
Companies can rank their information upwards, Google does interferred ranking.

Entries in Wikipedia in search engines: 200 random words from wikipedia, its strange enough that in google the wikipedia pages ranked among firts 10. It is proof that Google and Wikipedia do cooperation.

About the Google-Wikipedia issue

These two machines that many people consider reality are starting to change the googled reality.

Google can ruin the stock market.

My only hope is that Google is clever enough not to kill the cow they are milking.
They are using the knowledge in stock market, they probably realize that they should not go too far.

Antitrust against Google
Break-up between Google search engine and the other Google tools is needed so that there was no serious data-mining possible in economy with different google tools.

Problem in Wikipedia is keeping the information updated. It was better if from Wikipedia the link goes to the original site (of Herman Maurer webpage or Irakleon town page) rather than storing information in Wikipedia that is not new enough.

Difference between Wikipedias of countries.

You can cite only material that is stabile in time – thus you must not cite Wikipedia.

I have lots of criticism against wikipedia, i think it is too late to change the current version of Wikipedia. We probably need new start, but it may not happen.

Future:
The modern cellphones are getting close to what i think the future will look like. My basic concept is that we always will have computer with us, but not visible way (computers in the pocket, screens on the glasses).

Computer does powerful image processing, everything we want to be recorded can be sent to the computer.
Cameras and electronic compasses will be related with tools like Google Earth, knowing where we are and what information we need and create.

We are approaching towards collaboration and consulting society. The search engines are too much overloaded with cloned information. We need to specialize to smaller fields. We search from google some contacts and ask about real information.

There is usually 1-2 pearls in each research paper. I doubt is anyone reading the whole papers. What i consider is someone to open something like the ‘journal of pearls’.

Information retrieval is going to change. We want search engines that do find millions of entries and then produce certain 15 papers that are really relevant to our questions in mind.

Communicate experiences!

In 20 years: continuous recording what we see, hear, make and we make it accessible to the friends

In 40 years continuous recording of total sensory experience of persons, it will be made (partially) accessible to friends.
‘Diary of senses’
Fastforward techniques will help to re-experience the past.

This will make it possible to experience something FOR THE OTHERS.
This means that mankind is developing without noticing common memory.
Everything suddenly becomes an experience we have already felt.

technology enhanced learning in FP7 projects

My notes from introduction about FP7 projects of technology enhanced learning by Patricia Manson (EU, head of cultural heritage and technology enhanced learning, Information society and media)

Past guides us to the future:
Implentation of what has been done in the past has not been easy.
Using eLearning ideas to change the world has not taken place.
eLearning has become mainstream not merely a research area.
New approaches in research.

Some principles for good FP7 projects:
acceptance of discontinuity (resources, standards, multidisciplinary work, no technology coctails)
incorporating under what conditions and how better learning outcomes could be achieved with elearning
Pedaogy and organizational change
Dialogue between communities and researchers must be strengthened
Outcomes: what we expect to achieve?

3-7 years market in short term
5-10 years market for longer term

Limited number of challenges
Digital libraries and technology enhanced learning
Responsive environments that should be motivating, embedded in business process, systems that are anchored in reals situations,
Support in the transformation of learning outcomes into valuable knowledge assets (use and reuse of knowledge)
Personalization of learning experiences (which must be well defined eg. what, why?)
Interdisciplinary approach between cognitive and technological

Longer term target outcomes:
adaptible and intuitive (capable of intuitive perception)
learning and cognition
learning and humans and machines

Clusters of project proposals:
Exploring elearning strengths and learning weaknesses
Personalization and adaptive learning, dynamic mentoring
Services based on high performance distributed computing infrastructures
Learning and knowledge: interaction between learning and knowledge management technologies
Learning and cognition: understanding human learning
Collaborative learning

In current FP7 proposals there was greater focus on responsive learning environments, not yet on intuitive systems
Strong continuity of FP6 research

Technologies in most proposals:
semantic technologies and ontologies (60-70 %)
Conceptual modelling
Social software and tagging
Delivery of learning with PC and mobile

Expected trends:
From one pedagogical scenario to mix and match of pedagogical scenarios
Personalization (COMING FROM FP6): problems what personalization means, FP6 was more about personalizing content
Individual relationship between pupils and teachers
Autonomy of the learner
Learning at workspace
Stronger emphasize on learning and creativity, the use of creativity in workspace
Constructive approach of learning science, adaptivity
Personalization and adaptivity
Infrastructures and LMS’s

Projects that were successuful
Theories and technologies of game-based learning, focusing on learning sciences
Embedding learning seamlessly in work process, where knowledge matures
Adaptivity and guidance, language technologies
How creativity can be better supported at workspaces

Unsuccessful proposals:
- why we need solutions
- no definition of problems
- no learning objectives
- better is rather to stick to one of the FP goals than to many
- technology pushed projects without learning and cognition

elearning on the social semantic information

I was listening at ECTEL07 the presentation (see the proceedings) by Sebastian Kruk et al., which was very much technically supporting what we would like to do in the study of making school library 2.0 practically happen in one master study.

The main idea in the presentation was integrating blog (of the book), bookmarks and tags (of the teacher and the learners), and digital library work together in learning tasks.

Some environments for realising the idea, which i still need to test out:
http://notitio.us/
JeromeDL
SSCF
SIOC

Bruce Sterling keynote ECTEL 2007

ECTEL 07 keynote by Bruce Sterling, a fiction writer and computer science visioneer

About himself:
25 years in front of the computer
technology enhanced learning
technology enhanced literature

manual typerwriting 2 first books
3rd novel Technology enhanced literature

We don’t have technology enhanced literature, we have literature enhanced technology.

Architecture, engineering, industrial design, manufacturing – all technology enhanced…
Why are we doing it digital? Why don’t we do the real things and instead we do it over web. Are we doing actually better?

They all have same problems about software, necessity to educate people.

What it means that technology enhanced learning reaches full potential – then nothing will be left from previous order.

Nightmare scenario is also the ideal scenario, young people do not draw distinction between previous media forms and current. They live in the flow of liquid micromedia. They do not distinguish forms of media.

“I read first part of your books and then i could not get the concept, but then i went to your Flickr account and looked the graphs and i got it!”

Bruce Sterling of his new and unpublished novel:
It is about technology enhanced learning at 2050ies
Action takes place at the institution at small island,
an attention camp web 5.0 technology enhanced learning environment to do just in time learning,
everyone else in the world is horrified.
Most modern people are middle-aged women, these middle aged city women are offered a different life on the island, id-tags and they play the architecture of participation, recording everything what they see, labelling every plant day by day, weed by weed learning botany,
they use glory as the source of the community identity, the reason to be.
The most basic from women refugee camp life – from bad it becomes the real life, if communalities were found, if social networks emerged.
Social software was developed keeping in mind the gender differences, because men were not so successful and the tools became the tools of power. The camp as a search engine, learning machine.

The informal learning strategies of the society will rule.
Nobody have license, diploma in this future technology enhanced informal learning society.

Information society has no democratic patrol over digital revolution.

What will be left in 20 years of what we are doing now? New techniques, artifacts…

Its a compost a fertile soil what we do now..our roots are strong because they are in compost.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/14/sterling_sxsw/

ectel07

I am going to the ECTEL 07 conference with Terje Väljataga.
ECTEL weblog.

Our presentation in proceedings:
Theoretical Framework of the iCampFolio – New Approach to Evaluation and Comparison of Systems and Tools for Learning Purposes, Terje Väljataga, Mart Laanpere, Kai Pata, Mauri Kaipainen

course designs for web 2.0 tools

Recently i have had some thoughts and discussions with Sebastian Fiedler and Terje Väljataga about courses with web 2.0 tools in higher education. The question is, that although we intend to use social software for educational purposes..it doesn’t go that simple that we just teach how to blog, write wiki or so on.
These are only means, offering new environment for something meaningful we want to achieve. What would it be what we should stream for and where should the emphasis of the course be so that it meaningfully integrated web 2.0 tools? Content generation? Projectwork? Self-direction? Social retrieval patterns? Networking? Dealing with challenges?

We have tested in spring self-direction as the course focus, which brings along the nessecity to investigate social software from the affordance perspective when building personal or collaborative landscapes of web 2.0 tools for conductig certain activity patterns. This focus has worked out quite effectively, we are continuing running the same course…but

as we know this works there is a temptation to shift focus and try out something new.

One idea we briefly talked with Terje is what if to focus on the development, social retrieval and contextualization of new media objects in activity patterns. This idea is a continuation of what we have tested already at individual and team-learning level when students created complex landscapes and integrated their activity patterns with these by evoking certain affordances of the integrated environment.

The advancement is to highlight the role of media objects in the patterns.
Secondly, what is the role of these media objects for the users, how they contectualize and interpret objects in social networks? (This relates with my previous thinking that we should not talk of social networks that consist only of people, but of people and objects networks).
Thirdly, it is interesting, how the affordances of the environment and affordances of the media objects interrelate and influence each other?

So, the course could be of the distributed actvity systems in which we emphaise the role of media objects – their creation, roles in the activity, how media objects trigger new lines of activity patterns, how the environment with its affordances supports learning process with media objects etc.

Ok, it seems there are enough ideas to try it out and study.

Research database feeds

Today i discovered a nice thing what the research database SCOPUS offers. It is possible to order the feeds of any keyword of your interest and get the feed of your selected research papers running on your Netvibes or other aggregator. A good way to follow the new publications and helps to be always aware of what has been published!

google-mapping best schools

Estonian newspapers like to calculate which schools were best according to the state exams in different subjects. Now even one step further has been taken, google-mapping the best schools.

There are aslo some interesting trends that come out with such visualization – green signs demonstrate essay writing skills, which seem to be higher in northeast countryside region, blue signs for history are best at old university town, yellow geography signs are best around the richest area of the capital city (does it correlate with travelling?), purple signs for chemistry seem to favour capital and its neighbourhood, blue math signs are good at the tourism town.