Impressions Scholarcast

After CIO (Chief Information Officer) came CTO (Chief Technology Officer), the province of one-man startups when they start to commercialise. Now comes CXO (Chief Experience Officer) to look after the user experience. As an advocate for many years of the importance of human-computer interaction (now referred to as user experience)  I am very glad to see this trend. Saying the word CXO has a very ‘now’ sound.

My attention was drawn to CXO by a post from Mary Jo Foley who notes that J Allard has surfaced with this title at Microsoft.

Information Work Online Experiment post collection

Show-N-Tell Chronicles

Although I started using the note collection feature of the free online Office Live Workspace at this year’s beginning I have subsequently switched to Google Notebook. From the perspective of building a centralised notebook repository Google Notebook is more feature-rich.

Where meetings and conferences provide wi-fi access then Google Notebook (GN) is highly effective used on a laptop including the Eee PC. Meeting documents can be displayed in the browser and the  lower right corner of the web page given over to GN when the appropriate browser extension is installed (freestanding on Firefox 2/3 and accessed via the Google Toolbar on IE).

I have included a short screencast demonstration of GN in my new blog called Show-N-Tell Chronicles (RSS feed). Since at this point it actually has more than one post I can call it a screencast series. It’s amazing when planning a screencast how much you learn about a Web 2.0 service! Now I know about notebook sections that provide useful visible markers and links in the notebook navigation.

To date I have used GN mostly for personal use. By saving notebooks to Google Docs the notes collections can be published as web pages and downloaded as PDF, Word, ODF, HTML and text files. However, I am beginning to use the sharing and collaboration features of notebooks for a new research project as part of our new Health Informatics Research Centre.

GN is worth a second look.

Having agreed in a previous post with Martin Weller about the inappropriateness of traditional learning management systems in a social networking context I have been reading his blog further.

Martin has established a project called SocialLearn and done some thought research about what a social learning environment might be like. He proposes an interesting scenario and postulates on how various social media tools could interwork to provide professional and personal learning for a country vet. While the tool integration might be lacking at the moment the concept of ‘loosely linked applications could make learning/teaching easy, pedagogically sound and fun’.

I am attracted to this approach and will attempt to apply it to intra-university contexts and hope to tease out social media process patterns.

Hot on the heels of presentations by Iain (HOD) and myself to a group of local teachers of IT comes confirmation of the problems facing learning management systems (LMS). Iain made the point that the structured top-down approach of LMS technology was not necessarily leading to better learning for the students.

We see this point echoed strongly in a Wired Campus Blog post aptly titled ‘The Battle Between Web 2.0 and the Classroom’ by Maria José Viñas who quotes Martin Weller, and education technology expert from the OUUK. He was a pioneer of classic LMS at the OUUK with the introduction of Moodle. Despite his championing of LMS he now poses the question in his guest blog post:

when learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalisable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for?

Of course he is referring to the social networking tools made possible by Web 2.0 and which students are using before entering universities. He goes on:

the reason the centralised LMS is not the answer to the ‘web 2.0 problem’ for education is because in its software DNA it embodies the wrong metaphor. It seeks to realise the principles of hierarchy, control and centralisation – the traditional classroom made virtual. This approach won’t help educators understand the new challenges and opportunities they are now facing.

I entirely agree and will be spending research effort to convince my institution to take note and start to address and overcome the ‘web 2.0 problem’.

A remark made by a panelist at the recent International Conference on Computer-Mediated Social Networks (ICCMSN2008) is now echoed in research from Educause and its Center for Applied Research. A blog post from Jeff Young of The Chronicle indicates that students are beginning to watch their privacy on Facebook. Photos and comments in their Facebook profiles they would rather their future employers don’t see are being limited to friends only. Some common sense is creeping into the use of social networks at last.

With Peta Hopkins I attended the inaugural International Conference on Computer-Mediated Social Networks 2008 hosted by the Information Sciences (Information Systems) Department part of the Commerce Faculty at the University of Otago, Dunedin , New Zealand, over 11-13 June 2008. The conference was slow to use social networking tools but a Twitter account was set up just before the start (summary) and by the final day a conference wiki was created to host the many outputs of the conference including the collection of slides Slideshare.

In the conference programme there were three significant and varied keynotes:

• Martin Purvis (HOD Info Sciences, UO) eventually led us through some theoretical bases for social networks and their unintended effects. My favourite quotes were ‘Wikipedia is a process not a document’ and ‘needs AI that’s been 10 years away for 50 years’ (my own thoughts about AI since the 1960s). I found his suggestions about user generated tag post processing and extension very interesting.
• John Eyles (Telecom NZ and AUT futurist) showed us his gadgets (MP3 player/recorder, miniature HD video camera and smartphone) as he led us through a shaky definition of Web 3.0. He did convince us of the power of social network tools that allow us to control our synchronised life.His demo of creating a podcast on his smartphone that was delivered via 3G to his special conference blog using Hipcast was impressive.
• David Green (Monash) treated us to some complexity theory, the focus of his VLAB. He is simulating the connectiveness of social networks using simple boolean social networks that have led to the discovery of the fundamental dual phase evolution model that describes the flipping between local and global phases.

Amongst the single stream of 19 papers the presentation by Peta and myself was well received with plenty of questions afterwards. Several of the papers were from PhD students nearing their completion of niche projects involving the use of social networking tools. Some of the standouts for me were:

• Sophie Nicol from Deakin building elements of game-playing into the learning process
• Jocelyn Cranefield from VUW with her discovery of the middle layer of intermediary bloggers in a multi-layer online community
• Peter Sloep (OU Netherlands) building learning networks with self-populating wikis using Latent Semantic Analysis and peer mentoring
• John Downs (UA) who is using wi-fi-connected digital photo frames as one-way situated messaging appliances that can be scattered through the home or office helping to bind social communities
• Stephanie Broege (UO) who is conducting very interesting reseach into cell phone usage and extended to include social networks
• Fa Martin-Niemi (UO) using social media software with a niche financial services SME to leverage storytelling for improved communication as the company expands rapidly

In addition a quarter of the papers were presented by fanatical, not to say addicted, Second Life users. We heard in great detail about context building and scripting, the major problems with the SL architecture, and how Telecom NZ are even considering installing dedicated SL servers just to improve SL usage. With one of the speakers running 11 alternative characters it was estimated the real number of human users is nearer 300,000 worldwide against the 13 million claimed by Linden Labs.

The panel discussions were interesting but the extra panel created at the last moment to proclaim UO’s entry into iTunesU went on a little long at the end of a very full day.

I left with a better impression of the social networks community in this part of the world. There was not a lot of discussion about using social media at an enterprise level and I feel this is an area ripe for further research and development.