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.

It has taken me a while to catch up with the term ‘technology populism’. Sarah Perez in her post tells us this appeared in a Forrester report. It appears that technology populism means:

an adoption trend led by a technology-native workforce that self provisions collaborative tools, information sources, and human networks — requiring minimal or no ongoing support from a central IT organization

So it seems that when Gen Yers start to become a significant part of the workforce then the need for central IT services starts to diminish significantly. Scary, and not only for systems sourcing, implementation and support, but also the security issues of storing confidential information in the cloud.

Certainly my own InfoWOE work is indicating that I can use freely available online services and storage to carry out a large part of my day-to-day work. All it would take, and this is a long bow today, is my colleagues to collaborate in similar fashion. This is food for thought for all organisations.

David Cearley, a Gartner VP, has been speaking in Melbourne on the above topic. As reported in a post by eHomeUpgrade the top ten technologies are:

1. Multicore and hybrid processors
2. Virtualisation and fabric computing
3. Social networks and social software
4. Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
5. Web mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous computing
8. Contextual computing
9. Augmented reality
10. Semantics

It’s good to see I have strong current research interests in technologies 2 through 6. I am not feeling particularly disruptive but I definitely have more than enough to keep my mind stimulated with new ideas.

We now have a demo video below of some of the early features of multi-touch coming to Windows 7. There is little that is new in terms of multi-touch itself, although the on-screen piano keyboard is cute.

Of more significance will be the new hardware that is needed. Even today’s tablet PCs aren’t useful since they don’t use touch screens but rely on wireless pens. Thus we will need to see a whole new series of laptops with touch-sensitive screens before mutli-touch becomes a reality on Windows.

Multi-Touch in Windows 7

Via Mary Jo Foley.

With other colleagues at my institution we are trying to persuade the powers that be of the benefits of social media. Sarah Perez would escalate the issue considerably into a Social Media U. She proposes eight lessons:

1. Personal Branding: buy yourname.com to secure your brand, make a video resume, start a WordPress blog, use Google Reader, participate (comment on blogs and link to them), get on Facebook and LinkedIn, network, and more
2. Know What Web 2.0 Is And How To Use It: learn about tagging and how other people’s opinion can shape our perception
3. Learn To Use YouTube To Convey a Message
4. Learn to Blog
5. Use Social Networks
6. Master Wikis
7. Learn to Twitter
8. Learn To Podcast

Well in my current class I have already mentioned lesson 1, and lesson 4 is well underway and will last through the semester. Web 2.0 will be covered as it is a series of web applications, the title of the subject. Twitter, wikis and social network applications are likely to figure in choices for practical assignments. All of my lectures are being converted to screencasts so that covers lessons 3 and 8 to a large extent.

It looks like we are well on the way to Social Media U.

According to some we are entering into the next phase of blogging inevitably named Blogging 2.0.

Duncan Riley (blogoz panellist and ex TechCrunch blogger) has recently created his own professional blog, Inquistr. He takes a cogent look at  ‘blogging 2.0′ where all of a person’s social media activity on sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube as well as blogs is aggregated on sites like FriendFeed. It has been suggested that this trend will weaken professional blogging through fewer page views of the original blog site.

Quite rightly Duncan argues this will be a short term effect and blogging 2.0 should lead through the other social media channels to more views of blog content. I still think this will be at the expense of page views on the blog site itself which will effect:

• advertising revenue
• reduce onlinking to sites associated with the blog such as the blogroll
• use of specialist widgets on the blog for searching, tagging, stats and the like

After all this is already happening with the single purpose blog aggregators like Google Reader, Bloglines and Newsgator. I probably visit the actual blog site for perhaps 1 in 50 of the posts I read on Google Reader.

Thus it is clear that the content of the blog posts themselves is the key going forward. Adverts, links and widgets need to be subtly integrated with each post. Blog post structure and design will be ever more important.

Eight months ago in a previous post about AideRSS I lauded the benefits that I had found after only 2 weeks of use. These benefits have progressed in the interim so that now 6 out of my top 20 most frequently read blogs are filtered by AideRSS. This amounts to a saving approaching 300 posts each month. Yet I still feel I see the most important posts from those filtered feeds.

Today I read in a post from Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb (coincidentally one of my filtered feeds) that the PageRank algorithm has been improved by the addition of the frequency of occurrence in Twitter. PageRank now takes into account a blog post’s popularity in Google Blog search and Twitter. Technorati, IceRocket, and Bloglines have now been dropped as meriting consideration.

So moves the tide of popularity amongst social networks on the web.

This influence Facebook has over the social networking of university students across the world is undoubtedly significant and probably growing. The dominant learning management system used in universities is Blackboard. However by design Blackboard is a closed system within each institution and it would be very difficult to emulate Facebook’s global reach.

It is quite natural therefore that Blackboard should seek to link with Facebook so that students can be notified of significant Blackboard information changes within their favourite Facebook social environment. Thus we now have BBSync, a Facebook application that synchronises information changes from Blackboard. To allow institutions to control which information, if any, finds its way into the potentially public Facebook network Blackboard now provide a building block. This component also monitors and logs the use of the Facebook application.

Blackboard tells us:

Blackboard Sync is an application that delivers Blackboard course information and updates through the Facebook interface to keep students in touch and engaged with their academic studies.

Blackboard Sync enables students to connect with their classmates through Facebook, thus creating social learning opportunities.

Blackboard Sync offers several options for participation to give the institutions as much control as they need.

Students will certainly want this feature. Will my institution be ready to encompass it?

Via Twitter of course, Peta put me on to Twist. This site allows you to enter one or more keywords whose frequency of occurrence in Twitter are plotted so that trends emerge.

I quickly tried it with ‘twitter’ and an unexpected trend resulted:

From memory I believe the two noticeable peaks correspond to significant outages for the Twitter service, so maybe this is a quick way to see when Twitter was down.

Try the link for this chart for the last 7 days.

Flashie Battle wrote a very interesting post the other day that predicts that online Flash games (bite-sized games as he calls them) are starting to become a major games category. [For my new student readers Flashie is a very successful Bond IT graduate who writes online Flash games for advertising purposes on major accounts.]

As a person of considerable age I really love these simple online Flash games. You can play them quickly in the browser, the rules take 30 seconds to understand, they keep you challenged for hours, there are many to choose from, and most are free up to a certain level of complexity. My favourite site is PopCap with Peggle and Zuma being my favourites. My wife is totally hooked on Bookworm which we had to actually buy. Of course I was previously attracted to Desktop Tower Defense.

Now the idea of Flash online games has been taken to new heights by ‘games for a purpose’ reported by a Wired Campus post. These new online games with a purpose have been created by Luis von Ahn, the guy who brought us Recaptcha (stop spam, read books). Here users help decipher scans of words that defeat OCR software as well as proving it is a human entering data in an online form.

Now you can start gwapping to obtain high scores as well as helping to characterise, describe and index images so they can be searched efficiently, and also generate keywords that describe music. So you can help the world and be entertained at the same time. Happy gwapping.