31/10/2008 by nicola.

Saw this via Sachendra yesterday, a link to an article and discussion which should be required reading for anyone involved in the design of anything, or anyone who has thought about starting their own business.

I don’t wish to spoil the magic of it by going on about it too much here - I find it very difficult to find the right words to describe what I want or need in terms of learning design, but I know when I see something that doesn’t work for me or something that does - but that’s after its been designed and the chances are that its a bit of one thing and a bit of another thing - not a complete package that can be nicely defined with using a device, tool, system, hardware, software, open-source, free etc. Its very difficult as a human being if you say - I need this - then someone asks you to explain what that is exactly - well I find it difficult anyway!

And in 2008 we have a whole bunch of tools which we can use for a bit of this and a bit of that, but does that necessarily mean we learn better, if we weren’t exactly sure what we wanted in the first place and maybe how we wanted to learn - I think human beings are so random and if you ask people the same question on two different occasions you are likely to get two different answers depending on their circumstances / context etc.

Say you wanted to learn Flash i.e. I might want to learn Flash because I saw a really cool Flash animation and decided I wanted to be able to do those. Or I want to learn Flash because its a useful skill to have in learning technology related roles. Both of these are pretty vague though. How is a designer of learning and maybe in 2008 that is designing for myself, going to understand what I want before I start? I know I like messing around with stuff but ask me to define exactly what I mean by that….

Continuing with Flash for second, I might be able to spend some time learning how to make a ball bounce across a stage, work out how the Flash timeline works, understand the different file formats but is that taking me towards my goal in the best possible way and at the best possible speed? I might do this by following tutorials, or joining a Flash group / network, looking at blogs, wikis etc but is there any guarantee that the amount of time I spend doing this is helping me learn in the best way possible, am I asking the right questions of myself, to others, am I finding out what I need to know in order to move me forward? Is it exciting learning about this, am I being entertained with what I am seeing and hearing on the screen - does it look cool, is it making me laugh, can I find any connection with it to any of my previous experiences, anything I am interested in on a personal level and so on?

Think about the article if you just read it - did you feel connected to it, did it relate to you on a personal level, what bits and why….

Or the design of learning management systems, VLEs, learning content management systems, electronic performance support systems that repeatedly try to fit the needs of as many people as possible - how much time is spent with people asking whether they really wanted a system in the first place - rather than the what is it you are trying to do with accessing and organising learning, is a system of any kind a good solution? And if you have decided that its useful for companies to have systems, you go and ask a bunch of people what they want to do with it, what are the chances of you finding out what really works for them before you release the product? Where do you compromise? Why do you compromise?

Does this mean that analysis and design is a waste of time?

As previously mentioned - why not go and ask other people at Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations 2008 which is in a few weeks time, Jay/George/Tony are posting updates about this so if you haven’t already registered, why not stroll across to the site and sign up.

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30/10/2008 by nicola.

Renata Vincoletto of Falando pelos Cotovelos is raising money for Camfed. (See the wonderful poster)

You may already know of Camfed. They are “an international organisation dedicated to eradicating poverty in Africa through the education of girls and empowerment of young women. In Africa, where girls have least access to education and are most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, Camfed’s mission is to multiply girls’ access to education and accelerate the benefits to individuals, their families and communities.”

Renata is using Everyclick.com, a site where you can enter a search just as you would with any search engine, but you can choose the charity which benefits from the couple of seconds that you choose to type in your search and click. Renata explains all on her blog and how you can contribute in other ways too.

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29/10/2008 by nicola.

All meetups, conference titles should be this simple and clear. If by any chance you are interested in meeting and doing business in Africa; and you are able to get to Eindhoven, Netherlands next weekend, then this looks like an amazing opportunity to do so.

If you can’t and would like to, you can always join Club Africa and meet people, do business (it doesn’t have to be all commercial, lots of voluntary, education organisations there too) online that way. I have been on this network for a while, haven’t done anything specific yet, but had a few very useful conversations with a bunch of friendly people.

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25/10/2008 by nicola.

I was about to spend part of my weekend trying to figure out some of this, when I saw Dave Pollard’s post about connectivism & the week’s subject being about complexity, connection and learning. What ! So just to be clear, there are around 2000 people learning about this, and I am trying to figure out how the hell to visualise a wiki structure by myself. I mean 2000 people, there must be people with amazing technical and design abilities studying / talking about all this - and what, imagine if you have even 4 people, one with Java, one with design, one with wiki and one with - well whatever -it would take - 1 hour, 2 hours top to figure it out ?

I’m going to go and rediscover my weekend ! There must be amazing conversations and ideas flowing out from their experiences right now, I hope that if anyone out there knows of anything they could take maybe 5 seconds out of their day to send me a link or something and if not, so be it, but I don’t see it as a productive use of my time to spend any longer blogging about wiki stuff, happy to leave it to greater minds

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23/10/2008 by nicola.

Does the virtual world have to be better than other learning environments, can it be a replacement, is it necessary to be better?

A scenario could be where a lot of money goes towards development, a launch then enthusiasm falls after a few weeks and the number of visitors to an island drops off dramatically. Uni of Derby’s rationale for going in was to investigate opportunity for creative social learning experiences for psychology students - i.e. for medical practitioners it is easier to put ‘objects’ into a scenario and create a medical situation with problems to be solved, psychology deals with theories and concepts so if it is experiential learning, needs to be carefully thought about how it can be applied.

Non-verbal communication an issue - most communication in Second Life is via text chat, an avatar might be communicating with others, different gestures, moving away, moving back - not a lot of realism in face gestures etc Haven’t really sorted gestures in immersive environments - can be muffling for some - stops them expressing their emotions, for others it can be limiting. These things can seem very important to students and staff in their social interaction in these environments.

What about next gen - consensus in the room is that the next gen student is not majority, a lot of students require technology support and not as enthusiastic about spending time in that environment compared to other activities or work they would like to do. Uni of Derby had advantage in that already had game design lab available for use. For their learning activities in world, they created SLabs - which were basically empty slabs of land, with not additional ‘visual stuff’ that could be distracting - just a piece of land and any learning-activity specific content could be added and removed as required.”A space to remove everything we don’t need and just put the stuff we do”. The psychology students did not like it because they were busy enough and this was another thing to learn. They pre-created avatars so students could choose from an out-of-the-box avatar or create their own account.

A balance between creating something magic, beautiful and keeping it simple enough for students and staff to use. By contrast, a comment from Matthew Wheeler at Uni of Leicester - they have got their training down to 40 mins, scaffolding their second life experiences and the students have really enjoyed it and come back for more than their 4 allotted sessions. Another comment was that as with any technology, it is essential to to be clear about the purpose of the sessions or why the students are there if it is a directed activity of any kind.

Open Uni had a series of projects (attachment to follow) Immersive Learning Environments 2008 and ILE 2009. Students were encouraged to go and explore Second Life over Christmas (e.g. supplied notecards of places to visit), then had a theoretical introduction then shortly after a practical building induction. Mixed thoughts re different projects.

Some discussion - voice ? Mixed uni experiences with Second Life voice, some going back to text to provide better experiences, not just technology, but with live voice - no record of conversation, less thinking time, interruptions etc In some cases students not told that there was voice so issue did not arise. Some issues around identity and persona - if you create a SL persona and then wish to change or remove that persona, how to extricate yourself from that persona not just in SL, but other online environments.

Open Habitat Project - spaces can be social, flexible, dynamic, inspiring - can create different environments and scenarios for different choices of students - makes it more engaging and fun for students. Distance students enjoy sharing the same social spaces as other distance learners? If do Second life in real classroom and in Second life at same time, can be confusing for communication - do you talk to each other in real or virtual life? How to build sense of trust, what are good icebreaking activities if have different avatars as e.g. animals for example.

So where do virtual vs physical worlds fit - together ? mirrored ? augmented ? separate ? game-based ? alternate? which works best with which types of learning activities such as problem-based, role play etc. Authentic details are useful in 3D virtual worlds - e.g. for one Uni with international students, they wanted to see authentic city details before coming to UK, e.g. a simulation of how to put your hand out for a bus etc. Its important to build in reflection time as well as engagement.

Useful with alternate reality in that you learn without realise you are - because you are using your technology / communication method of choice such as blog, photos, video, so no learning curve - ‘under-the-surface’ learning.

Professor Maggi Savin Baden summing up, mentioned about VW special issue of ALT-J in November and new CURLIEW Coventry Uni project:

1. Boundary issues in IVWs
2. Distance versus blended learning in IVWs.
3. Amplification of RL character in SL
4. Patterns that inform - scenarios/ways of doing/ideas that seem to work
5. Trust - how do you know what honesty, trust is in SL
6. Cooperation vs collaboration in these environments
7. Relationship between embodiment and learning - do you feel more real as an avatar.
8. Interrupts concept that identity is hegemonic.

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23/10/2008 by nicola.

Hi,

If you want to follow - the video of the day is being streamed live into Second Life

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Coventry%20University/140/147/137/

Will try and blog later, not possible at this moment

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20/10/2008 by nicola.

Got distracted by still trying to embed dynamic ‘things’ like a Wordtree visualisation on wiki pages - think I’ve found a way to do which haven’t done yet -on Google Sites wikis. Just to make it confusing for anyone unfamiliar with Java (programming) and JavaScript (browser scripting) they are not the same, but the Java applet visualisation in Many Eyes can be embedded using JavaScript. You can use with Google Gadgets API as per this explanation on Google groups by embedding in an iframe which lives like a floating box on top of your regular web page. iframes are not great from an accessibility point of view, but you can use them on various wikis. Don’t have time to look at an API right now but will return to…

Whilst I’m going completely off topic, if you ever want to know more about JavaScript, there’s a nice friendly tutorial that explains it using wild bears.

Profiles
If you have an enterprise wiki solution, there is a possibility that your wiki will be talking to other applications you use, maybe all linked so the chances of having more information other than your name is more likely. However for public free hosted wikis, it is more likely that the profile information is not likely to be as detailed because it partly depends on the person who has filled it in - with the multitude of things we sign up for, filling in profile information each time into different boxes in forms is less and less appealing. Or in some cases it is little more than a contact details form e.g.

With some wiki software, they give you the option to add tags to your profile - this could be about areas that you might be interested in. So if someone is using a wiki for the first time and would like to find other people as well as content with similar interests, the tags can be really helpful. You could then create visualisations of tags, in the same way as many of the delicious add-ons that have been created e.g. in Malinka Ivanova’s great post earlier this year.

However, this is starting to stray into social graph territory which is way beyond simple visualisations of who is doing what on a wiki and the additional visualisation of other areas in which a person might be social, could be distracting rather than helpful - will it actually make a wiki more social / does a wiki need to be more social?

Bearing that in mind, will attempt to do experiment 3 - soon. This series of posts is as usual, my attempt to throw some ideas out there - I know a whole bunch of stuff about web pages and wikis, I’ve been playing around with charts, formulas in spreadsheets (can’t really do anything in egovernment without being buried occasionally spreadsheets !) and some visualisation stuff for several years but do not consider myself to have expertise in either of these when it comes to extraction of data of any kind. I’m kind of hoping / dreaming that anyone who comes across these posts with more experience in a particular area can point me in a useful direction…

Likewise for experiment 5 when I try and put some of this into a 3D environment, I have until now purposely avoided things like Lindenscript (and no room to think with all the other programming languages I am attempting to do stuff with) and I have not built anything other than a media and web page ’screen’ in Second Life so far. I’m really hoping someone else has already found a way, there is a wikiHUD for Second life wiki which may be a starting point.

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19/10/2008 by nicola.

Based on my experience with wikis, pages can be created in two ways - using something like an Add Page or Create page button, or by creating a hyperlink - such as tikiwiki and from what I remember, tiddlywiki (also open source) uses the same kind of idea.

But first a note about web page design. If you are doing web design and you meet a client for the first time, one of the most useful things you can do is sketch out (digitally or on paper) like a flow chart - the navigation - as you get ideas - because once you get beyond your first six ideas it can quickly become complicated trying to work out what needs to link back to where and how. Lots of web editing and web publishing tools have this built in, so you can see your web site structure growing as you add possible pages.

With wikis, the game completely changes because most wikis don’t have built in options for visualising possible structures and with lots of people as editors, they just naturally create pages as they get ideas or attend events or whatever and suddenly you end up with lots of content which may well have internal hyperlinks within the page content itself but other than a list of “All pages” or something like that, it is difficult to understand what is going on inside the wiki as a whole. Also people want to find information quickly and if they can’t visualise where it might be, they will need to search (another web page opens on their screen) or ask and wait for answer - and it would be useful to reduce the need to do this. Users / learners want multiple paths through content and providing ‘maps’ is one way for anyone that would like to plan a route

Once wikis start growing, it might be helpful if you could visualise how it has grown and the patterns of links between pages, it might provide some insight into the ways people like to organise their thinking. In a recent Google Texttalk, a visual wiki was demonstrated by a university in Auckland:

(recommend high quality view, approx 33 mins)

You can see in action E.g. Thinkbase (Thinkmap+freebase), Thinkmap+Confluence, Thinkmap+Mediawiki shows visualisation of content in a map on LH side based on content of words in RH side - not an overall visualisation of wiki as in pages etc It doesn’t include mapping of comments and uses Java.

Most visualisation tools that I have played with seem to display with Java or Flash. Confluence which is one of the best wiki software I have used (Atlasssian, Stewart Mader, Wikipatterns etc) is not open source but has an open source version available if you can demonstrate that your organisation is already using open-source tools etc Media wiki which is open source has a lot of options for integrating with other tools, there are lots of developers making that happen. Don’t know about Freebase.

The completely awesome Chris Harrison has done some brilliant visualisations from Wikipedia too, this is the kind of thing I would like to have achieved (but couldn’t - just don’t have necessary understanding to do yet). Just like with a tool like Visuwords with each wiki page title appearing and related pages or something like that. There are several other wikipedia visualisation examples on 95 and 96 of the meryl.net list but I haven’t had a chance to look at those yet.

So onto the experiment. I used this Wikiversity page and filtered it to 500 results. Then cut and pasted the page titles as text only, into notepad then put in open office calc sheet, manually pasted user data into second column and redirect pages into third column then saved as CSV. Deliberately not trying anything using formulas yet btw, trying to imagine you are a user with no experience of spreadsheets (!)

Tried uploading into Swivel, but it just displayed as a table (I might have done something wrong) so no good. Had a look through various visualisation tool lists but couldn’t see anything quite appropriate so returned to Many Eyes. Tried various visualisation options such as Treemap, but couldn’t get the data to display. So was reduced to going back and using WordTree again, which is useful but not as far as hierarchical structure of pages.

Tried using chart tool in open office calc sheet but no different - 500 rows makes it unreadable, which I think is why it didn’t work in Many Eyes. So without pulling all the data in a more meaningful way than just cut and pasting text (or even if I had selected the text as hyperlinks, same result for now), so if you are a user with no experience of using formulas or manipulating data in spreadsheets, it is not going to be that easy - I have yet to find a way to get it display in a map format of some kind. You could reduce the list from Wikiversity to 20 or 50 and try again but I have had enough for one day

Experiment 3 will look at possibilities of finding and visualising relationship data, by looking at profiles and whether its possible to pull relevant data from a ‘web form’ then display it. I’m not confident what can actually be achieved with this, started having conversations 1, and somewhere in the middle of 2 on InternetTime Ning community last year. Experiment 4 will go back to the content again, I’ve had a very quick look at some of the features in open office spreadsheets etc so will be closer to the kinds of things Tony Hirst mentioned in his blog. Experiment 5 , if possible will be to try and work with some of this in 3D.

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18/10/2008 by nicola.

Tools used: Pbwiki, mindmaps - various, Tagcrowd, Wordle, Many Eyes - all free tools (to some extent, see mindmaps below for further info)

Wiki have been playing around with today is pbwiki - due to having text and some tags that I could use. I looked at 4 mapping tools today - mindomo, mindmeister, mindmymap and cmaps - very briefly and want to state that there may be ways of doing these but I couldn’t find them personally today.

I wanted to know if it was possible to just cut and paste text from a webpage - i.e just lifting it straight from the words you see on the wiki page i.e. put it into Notepad and remove any formatting weirdness then paste into one of these tools. Or the wikipage from its markup, or go further and select the source code (html code that the web page is written in)
e.g. IE 6 & 7 select Page and View Source,
Firefox= View then Page Source,
Chrome= Page icon, then Developer then View Source,
Safari= View then View Source
Opera= View then Source or Ctrl+U
Then as with just copying text direct from the web page, stick into Notepad then paste into a map using one one of the tools.

This is a backwards way of using a mind or concept mapping tool because the text had been already created on the wiki, but I was curious as to whether you could find key concepts, common themes. There was no way of importing or pasting - in some of the tools you can attach files (but not in free versions as far as I could see) but I don’t know if these just live as an attachment ‘icon’ on the map and therefore not searchable.

So then thought maybe tags - find the tags from the wiki and put these into a concept/mind map and play around with the features to see what kind of visualisations could create - but with this particular wiki there were only 12 tags created so far that were related to the wiki content, so didn’t.

I have used tagcrowd in the past - I know I can embed it into wikis because I’ve done this when I was using a wiki which didn’t have a tagcloud feature, depending on the wiki - unfortunately most wikis currently have different ways of coding things when you put in html code (like the kind of code you grab for widgets, gadgets, badges etc and paste into your blog or site). Wiki-Creole is a project attempting to try and create common wiki coding for all.

Anyway, with tagcrowd (its like Wordle but less display options, but you can show the frequency of a word which is useful). I just copied and pasted directly from the web page (without going to the source code) into the paste box in tagcrowd and selected the following(please click on images to enlarge):

This was the result:

I then tried inserting it, using the html code provided, back into a pbwiki page. It didn’t work - well it wouldn’t add it as html (pbwiki magic option) separately so I tried sticking it in by clicking source and got this:

To cut a long story short, you would need to style it yourself in order to make it look as interesting as a regular tag cloud, ie the more popular words bigger font etc On a different wiki in the past I have not needed to do this, so it may be possible with other wikis, I don’t know yet.

So, went to Many Eyes next. Many Eyes is amazing software where you can upload all kinds of data including text and create visualisations, any time you use it, it will be made public. I pasted in the same text that I had used for tagcrowd and found some interesting visualisation features.You just click visualize and scroll down through all the options.
Tagcloud - it didn’t show the 500+ but you can search for tags.

I found the Word Tree useful in terms of visualising the different structures - it gives a much better idea of how people might have attempted to organise their thinking. This wiki is being developed by politics students and is about the European Union, so I just put in the word European. Then clicked Publish to publish it - if you look under the visualisation and choose share this, it gives options to share as a static image or as a live visualisation.

There are so many other amazing features with Many Eyes, including commenting on and watching visualisations so they really are such exciting, living documents. I can’t embed this back on pbwiki currently because their 2.0 version does not support embedding scripting such as JavaScript, but I think the Word Tree definitely has potential to pick up ideas about the content of that wiki page.

UPDATE: This is the same data as a Wordle too. I have tried entering the html code to display it as a plugin (pbwiki magic), into the source code but it doesn’t show up. So I took the image URL from wordle.net and tried inserting as an ‘image from URL’ and that didn’t work either.

Experiment No2 will be looking more at the overall visualisation of a wiki structure rather than on the content, i.e. once you get beyond 10 pages of a wiki, how can you start to visualise how it has grown. Am not sure at this point if can do with all open source tools -a couple of ideas but not sure yet.

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18/10/2008 by nicola.

Yet again Tony Hirst has done some magic on OUseful with data, Yahoo Pipes (I created my first pipe after reading through Tony’s example whenever it was - a year, 2 years ago?) A thousand thanks again to Tony for explaining everything so clearly as ever with achievable steps that I can follow. I could sit there for years and it would probably never occur to me that I could find an import html function in a spreadsheet.

Brilliant - so much to go and play with now - will put mobile stuff on hold for a bit. If you want to look at mobile learning stuff, check Ignatia webs, she has already started to do some great thought-provoking write-ups from Mlearn. Indeed if you ever want to look at mobile learning stuff, Ignatia webs is one of the wonderful places to start, in fact 8 out of 10 mobiles said they like what they see there.

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