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.