25/09/2008 by nicola.

Interesting presentation asking about the types of mobile user experience that you might be hoping to achieve and interaction considerations. I have only been looking at this recently, there are experts such as C.Enrique Ortiz who have been analysing the present and future mobile experience for many years. I’ve been also trying to think about what kinds of interactions can take place in the environment, what is a mobile user looking for, how they would like that interaction to take place, what benefit can they get from connecting in different ways, what is the context…

There’s a nice table on Slide 9 which outlines types of interactions, availablity, cost etc These could all be part of any mobile learning solution that you may wish to consider for an audience that might be mobile and will affect the kind of interface you might like users to be able to access when they first open your mobile learning application or widget etc

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18/09/2008 by nicola.

A million wikipedias

Would like to thank the following p e o p l e and many other very wise people whose thoughts on wikis and collaboration - have helped shape my own thinking as I have been talking about wikis with people for a few years - and in the last 24 hours too as am preparing for some wiki training which am about to deliver. Have never done wiki training before - very exciting - have produced guides and lots of chats with individuals and small groups, (kind of took up residence in wikis in 2006) but not often you get the chance to go and discuss wikis with 80 students.

So what are wikis anyway - are we in reality with all the different wikis out there, creating millions of online sets of wikipedias ? Does that matter ? What do we use wikis for?

No one could create a wikipedia - that would be like someone writing the whole web about everything and everyone in existence and has even existed. Having said that, I am currently using one wiki in a most unwikilike way - as my online notebook because I find it much easier for linking and putting together other info quickly, that I can return to whenever - and figure that whilst on a wiki, don’t have to bother with sharing certain bits and/or permission levels - just make it public - whoever stumbles across it - they may or may not find anything of interest and can contribute / edit or whatever (I do backup occasionally in case someone deletes the lot, but may not even bother with that in the future, its its meant to be…)
I’ve come across a few people who are also using wikis for this purpose too. In my case its just about a wish to make information and ideas public and my personal content creation preferences.

What about command and control? I joined citizendium but mostly due to lack of time initially, I didn’t contribute anything. Then somewhere along the way I decided that citizendium would be better as a widget on wikipedia - rather than a rewrite of everything already on there. If there is information where people feel sufficiently moved by its contents in terms of whether they think it is appropriate / relevant / accurate and/or is about / relates to them in a personal way - but don’t wish to either edit or discredit the information themselves - could use something like citizendium within a widget on that page.

If it was a widget, it could have links to other sources of information that provide alternative viewpoints to the one on wikipedia. The widget could also highlight that there is not only one viewpoint that is accepted as reliable or ‘truth’

As in the great words of Kahlil Gibran (written 1923)

Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.” Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”

I can’t wait to hear what the students think of wikis and see how they are going to make use of one, how useful they will find it - can they discuss, debate, will they be adopting different wiki patterns and antipatterns or wikigardeners, how they will feel about content and ownership etc

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18/09/2008 by nicola.

UPDATE - I think I’ve discovered the best thing about Exit Reality - having a shortcut button at the bottom of my screen which says Exit Reality - I like having escape routes

That’s quite a claim and difficult to prove wrong unless anyone out there would like to start looking at page 1 of the web - let us know when you reach the end and whether they were right or not

I just spent about a minute having a quick look at my site in 3D - reminds me a bit of some of the other 3D site options have played around with before - I haven’t created an account yet and am guessing that default avatar is a man then - this is a quick walk around my site on Exit Reality I didn’t bother to look at how to get started so just clicked a few buttons/icons and went with it. The movement of the avatar is actually a lot more fluid - the video makes it look a little stilted.

This looks fun though - too much walls though - but maybe doors and walls should represent websites which are created using proprietary codes and then something less ‘wall’ like for opensource ones. Definitely would like to spend more time with this too.

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16/09/2008 by nicola.

I’ve got a todo for Surrey which not quite getting round to due to semester start, it is looking at ways of visualising research, hopefully in the near-ish future from wikis but initially will be from other databases / web pages / any other sources (could also be spreadsheets and documents too). Steps may be:

1a) Depending on how complex it is to pull the data from these sources, would like to create visualisations - Many Eyes seems like a good starting point, due to ease of text upload and variety of visualisation options available.
b) would also like to pull relationship data - not just project info but profile data too - SweetTools has a huge list of possible ways of pulling data (most of which look technically beyond me personally)
2. Display this visualisation in a 3D environment and also on a wiki. I have started to mess around trying to insert mindmaps (mindomo, mindmeister, ekpenso so far) as collaboratively dynamic editable objects onto wikipages without much success so far (going to try Google Sites next, this may work in which case Google is entitled to take more of my soul). I haven’t tried any graphs, charts - maps you can insert but as per above I have not found ways to make these very collaboratively editable as objects within themselves.
3. Have a wiki in 2D and a linked visualisation and/or wiki in 3D environment which can be edited / updated either via 2D or 3D, depending which dimension you or your avatar find yourselves in.

I’ve been looking at the Studio Wikitecture project - I remember seeing something about this ages ago but now in more detail, the video is amazing. You can also visit the completed project in-world in Second Life. I know there are possibilities using search engines in 3D / visualisation as a search engines, but this is a great concept too. If anyone interested in being involved too, please do let me know…

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15/09/2008 by nicola.

Mobiforge and Mobiforge mobile - formerly devmobi but launching today - a one stop place for everything related to mobile development

“if you’re interested in the amazing opportunities and technologies of the Mobile Web, then this is the site for you”

It really all is in one place, bigger and better than ever! You can find information and more importantly a dynamic community to help you analyse if you need or want mobile applications, what is the best route for developing them and sharing them with others, multiple facilities for testing (e.g.ready.mobi), a huge device database (device atlas) - if you’ve never thought about how to use content for mobile devices or thought about but confused about the range of options out there, mobiforge can take you through that process.
Fantastic !

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14/09/2008 by nicola.

I’ve just watched this 3 min video of Antony Lowenstein talking about his experiences over the last few years travelling to China, Iran, Iraq, Syria and following their blogging practices. He has written a book called The Blogging Revolution which is now out on Amazon.

This reminds me of Doris’s post in Connecting-Online, a week ago about the how you can be better connected (in terms of richness of experience) when you know more than one language because there are lots of blogs in Arabic, Chinese, Korean which I would love to follow but because I don’t know the language, I can’t. As a result, you can end up following ones which are written in English as well, which may provide only one view of circumstances in a particular country.
One of the English ones I follow from Iraq (although she is leaving soon) is the Neurotic Iraqi Wife.

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08/09/2008 by nicola.

I visited the Vollee website yesterday and was excited to find that they have recently added more phones to their list, which support Second Life. It downloaded and installed ok. Its a bit ‘clunky’ to try and navigate and it opens up a separate note everytime you want to write something, so you can’t type straight into the bar on the screen. It was amazing though - especially for a mobile application ! I didn’t get as far as teleporting anywhere but did manage to chat for a few minutes, using the in-world IM.

On a separate Second Life note, George Pop’s presentation and slides from last week are now available (About half way down the page on LH side. SL video is 68 MB, hope to compress this week if get the time). The screen recording worked really well with Wegame although there is 1 slide and a bit of audio missing where I idiotically started doing something on my screen whilst recording which of course it captured

Hope that for anything future, we will now have a Surrey centric approach to publishing Surrey related Second Life stuff, so will not be putting anything more on this blog anyway.

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04/09/2008 by nicola.

Over the last few years, George Siemens and colleagues have taken online conferences way beyond proof of concept into carbon friendly, dynamic hubs of innovation and discussion. Whether you’re bleeding edge or running as fast as you can in the opposite direction, this is a fantastic opportunity to talk with others from all industries and extend those conversations back into your workplace. Why?

You start them online, you can track them online and how easy is it then to continue them online… think trip report 2.0

You might be battling ever new knowledge, technology, media frontiers or being asked to talk and present about them. Being asked to explain where Enterprise 3.0 is going whilst you’re still trying to figure out Enterprise 2.0? How to become the next Google? How much content to create, how much staff can create for themselves, how much customer input, how to support it, where to support it, does it even need supporting…..

Why not ask a couple of thousand people what they think too ?

Did I mention its free - not just talking about banknotes, it means if you have a pc and internet connection, you can be a part of it.

Keep watching this blog for developments.

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03/09/2008 by nicola.

Learning Circuits Big question is: Do you have a to-learn and list and how do you work with that list?

What a question - I am too chaotic to have a list (suddenly I see a new thing to learn - that maybe I need less chaos and more lists), my personal development is related to Taekwondo and here is a list of sorts, apologies - nothing to do with how I learn in the workplace, but I am learning these for my life so hopefully can transfer them back. There are variations on these but in principle:

From barrel.net

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02/09/2008 by nicola.

Wish I’d known about it on Sunday, shows how much I’ve been keeping up with their lab stuff of late

Haven’t read about it in detail, going to try and download it tomorrow if it appears. My favourite posts & comments from others so far from others on this - that make me want to spend time thinking about more:

Ahab on Google OS is actually a browser

Angus Kidman on Google Browser, 10 reasons why its a bad idea

Darren Waters on BBC Dot life blog

Zubin Wadia’s assessment

Om Malik’s Why is Google releasing a browser

Like lots of others I guess, not entirely sure yet what this means for firefox but Mozilla’s recent concept Aurora browser videos are worth looking at too, I don’t see Mozilla disppearing any time soon. It will be interesting to see how everyone finds the browser tomorrow, how much in reality it affects web development (how much of it is really oh no not another browser, if it’s based on webkit), but a browser which is based on an open source application framework and runs on a pc sounds like very exciting news !

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