Planet Semantico

Los de Google no saben estar quietecitos y lanzan hoy Google Wave. La mala noticia es que no es para todos, por lo menos de momento. Así que los más curiosos deberán esperar algo más de tiempo antes de probar en primera persona cual es la interpreatación de "trabajo colaborativo" según el gigante de Mountain View.

Google Wave es una plataforma para la creación y edición colaborativa de documentos, pero puede ser utilizado como una Wiki o un sitio en el cual organizar una quedada para tomar unas cañas. Es el sistema que (dicen) remplazará email y mensajería instantanea en las empresas (y ya son palabras mayores...).

Hoy unos cien mil afortunados han recibido una invitación para empezar a jugar con Google Wave y... no pueden invitar a sus amigos, tal y como pasó con Gmail (!) Lo que sí pueden hacer es nominar a 8 amigos que irán a la cola de los nuevos potenciales usuarios... Todos los demás deberán aceptar que hay más vida fuera de Google.

Se hace cada vez más dura la lucha entre el modelo de negocio de "software de pago en mi maquina" (la de Microsoft para entendernos) y la de "software gratuito en el servidor de otros" (la filosofía googliana).

Nosotros esperamos nuestra invitación.. y os contaremos

Google, Spanish, google wave

• Cubicle Muses – Wave's Web of Protocols
  (tags: google development opensource programming webdev web http diagram tutorial research startup api email collaboration)
• OWL 2 RL closure « Ivan’s private site
  (tags: owl rules python)

English, Links

Me llamaba especialmente la atención el comentario de Roberto a una noticia en La Vanguardia, ¿Asfixiados por la red social?, sobre la vuelta a la intimidad que se estaría dando en algunos ámbitos sociales,  hartos del despliegue sin censura en las redes de imágenes y vídeos de fiestas:

“En Nueva York se convocan fiestas off the record. Es decir, ni se comenta, ni se graba. Lo que se hace aquí, se queda aquí. Protocols NYC las organiza cada dos semanas. Se va por invitación para charlar con gente influyente “por negocios y por placer”.

La idea nos devuelve la desobediencia civil de Thoreau, cuando redactaba Walden desde su ailamiento voluntario en los bosques como forma de protesta, reflexión y sabiduría….

En fin…que es una idea que desde mi habitual optimismo tecnológico no me hubiera motivado más que curiosidad, si no fuera por lo que leía después, desde el ámbito educativo y por parte de David Wiley acerca de la posibilidad que abrirán las futuras evoluciones de medir los datos sobre nuestros estudiantes en la web como forma de evaluación estricta y feedback, tal y como se acostumbra a hacer en ámbitos con una tradición científica más rigurosa (como la física).

¿Qué será de nosotros, que cometimos el error de leer Summerhill (idealismo en pedagogía) y nos hemos dedicado a defender ante miradas escépticas las virtudes creativas de la educación abierta, ante este posible escenario de gran hermano educativo al más puro estilo de la pesadilla Walden Dos (realismo)?

¿Huiremos de Walden dos hacia el Walden original, salvaje, de Thoreau? ¿Será la red la antítesis de un Summerhill sumergido bajo un alud de métricas y datos para reproducir el control?

No ayudaba demasiado a calmar mis inquietudes la “frikistoria” del investigador de Microsoft Gordon Bell, que se ha pasado a la e-memoria, a base de  grabar y digitalizar su vida. Metáfora o realidad, nos dice:

“En 2020, nuestras vidas al completo estarán online y serán rastreables. Teléfonos inteligentes con localización y nuestra memoria en las nubes harán de este tipo de transición algo posible si no inevitable. Es una revolución que cambiará lo que entendemos por ser humanos”

La web de las cosas, la web y el mundo en una sola cosa y la posibilidad de utilizar sensores ,métricas y registros para todo,  pueden evolucionar, a poco que les dediquéis imaginación, hacia la atractiva Singularidad o  hacia escenarios en los que cosas tan importantes ahora,  como la privacidad que hoy nos preocupa, sean anacrónicas.

La transparencia absoluta es, de hecho, un requisito importante de la objetividad que nos promete la web semántica (quien nos lo iba a decir cuando jugábamos a que nadie supiera de nuestra identidad real ).

Y aunque creo que deberíamos seguir apostando por ella, que tenemos y cultivaremos las suficientes dosis de creatividad para escapar de los infiernos del control y porque quiero creer que aún está, en cierto modo, por construir, quería dejaros esta reflexión.

Relacionados

La cara oculta de la tecnología RFID y la web de las cosas

Nuevas claves sobre el cambio, la evolución en la web. Reflexión y conversaciones.

Inteligencia, conciencia continua aumentada: Google nos hace más inteligentes

2009, Activismo, Ciencia, Control social, Evolución, Planeta educativo, Redes sociales, Spanish, TRABAJOS DESTACADOS, Web 3.0, Web Semántica, cibercultura, cloud computing-web 4.0, comunidades, control, cultura 2.0, cultura general, curiosidades, derechos humanos, e-learning2.0, e-memoria, educacion, educación 2.0, edupunk, evaluación, futurismo, intimidad, privacidad, prospectiva, singularidad, skinner, sociología, summerhill, thoreau, transparencia, walden, web 2.0, web de las cosas, web3.0, zeitgeist evolución

Yesterday, the Society of Chief Librarians made national news with their new initiative attempting to make libraries accessible to all. The collections of more than 4,000 libraries across England, Wales and Northern Ireland will be open to any member of the public by showing their existing library card, or proof of address, to join or access any library they are visiting.

Tony Durcan, formerly president of the Society of Chief Librarians explains:

“If you’ve joined one library service, why do you have to go through the bureaucratic process of filling in forms to join another?”

The Society’s Chief, Fiona Williams supports this further by saying:

“Libraries are a public service for everybody. We want people to know that all libraries are open to them, not only the libraries where they live. This is an important step towards making libraries even more accessible to all.”

Though items borrowed must be returned to the library from where they came, so far the initiative has generated positive feedback and appears to be welcomed across the board. However, questions are now emerging including those raised by Mick Fortune of Library RFID Ltd.:

“Should I now be lobbying Oxfordshire to cancel their subscription to online information services because I, and everyone else in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, can now access them by joining say, Manchester online? How will the companies providing these services stay in business if only one authority pays a sub? Will Manchester council tax payers be prepared to pick up the tab for the whole country?”

This begs the question whether this initiative really is the significant move forwards that it has been painted to be? Have the consequences highlighted by Mick Fortune been taken into serious consideration? Watch this space as the debate continues.

Image published by framework_zend on Flickr

Book lending, English, Libraries, Library, Society of Chief Librarians, Talis, Uncategorized, books

• Caterina.net: Working hard is overrated
  (tags: productivity business entrepreneur startup entrepreneurship advice lifehacks flickr time article culture inspiration blog)

English, Links

The new version 2.0 of the Recovery.gov site was launched today. I've been tracking recent happenings on Twitter and elsewhere, so here are some recent developments:

• The new site is available here.

read more

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Earl Devaney, English, Internet forum, On the Web, Online Communities, SIOC, Social network, YouTube, twitter

The new version 2.0 of the Recovery.gov site was launched today. I've been tracking recent happenings on Twitter and elsewhere, so here are some recent developments:

• The new site is available here.

read more

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Earl Devaney, English, Internet forum, On the Web, Online Communities, SIOC, Social network, YouTube, twitter

Mozilla (amongst others, see Chris Messina’s writeup of the trend, also Matt’s) have been exploring site-specific browsers through their Prism project. These combine aspects of the Web and Desktop environments, allowing you to have a desktop app tuned for browsing just one specific Web site. Prism is an application which, when run, will generate new per-site desktop applications. Currently it does not yet have a fancy packaging/installer, so users will need to install Prism plus the site files separately.

I have started to look at Prism as a basis for accessing robust, mirrored sites, so that a single point of failure (or censorship) might be avoided. With a lot help from Matt and others in #prism IRC chat, I have something almost working. The idea is simple: hack Prism so that the running browser code intercepts clicks and (based on some as-yet-undefined logic and preferences) gets the page from a list of mirrors, which might also be fetched dynamically from the ‘net.

I should also mention that one motivation here is for anti-censorship tools, to give users an easy way to access sites which might be blocked by their IP address or URL otherwise. I looked at FoxyProxy as an option but for site-specific robustness, running a full proxy server seems a bit heavy, compared to simply duplicating a set of files. Here’s what the main Prism app looks like:

Once you have Prism installed, you can hack a file named webrunner.js to intervene when links are clicked. In OSX, this can be found as /Applications/Prism.app/Contents/Resources/chrome/webrunner/content/webrunner.js.

Edit this: _domActivate : function(aEvent)

I added the following block to the start of this function:

var link = aEvent.target;
if (link instanceof HTMLAnchorElement && !WebRunner._isLinkExternal(link)) {
aEvent.preventDefault();
WebRunner._getBrowser().loadURI(“http://example.org/mirrors/”+link.href,null,null);
}

The idea here being that we intercept clicks, and rewrite them to point to equivalent http:// URIs elsewhere in the Web. As far as this goes, it works as advertised. But what I have is far from working… it would need some code in there to find the right mirror URLs to fetch from. Perhaps a list might be fetched on startup or first time a link is followed. It could also do with some work on packaging, so that this hacked version of Prism plus some actual site-specific browser config can be made into an easy-install Windows .exe or OSX .app. For a Windows installer, I am told that NSIS is a good place to start. You could also imagine a version that hid the mirrored URLs from user’s view. Since Prism has a built-in option to completely hide the URL navigation bar, I didn’t investigate this idea yet.

OK I think I’ve written up everything I learned from the helpful folks in IRC. I hope this repays some karma. If anyone cares to explore this further, or wants to help target student projects on exploring it, please get in touch.

Activism, English, coding

The new version 2.0 of the Recovery.gov site was launched today. I’ve been tracking recent happenings on Twitter and elsewhere, so here are some recent developments:

• The new site is available here.
• Rusty Talbot from Synteractive, the developers of Recovery.gov version 2.0, has posted a thread on the Sunlight Labs discussion forum asking for input from citizen developers regarding ways to make data available from Recovery.gov.
• Nextgov have a great summary article about Recovery.gov’s call for data provision ideas with some interesting quotes from the individuals concerned.
• Raymond Yee, a colleague of Eric Wilde and Eric Kansa at Berkeley, has published an interesting blog post with advice for Recovery.gov. They co-authored the report “Proposed Guideline Clarifications for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” earlier this year.
• You can now follow Recovery.gov on Twitter.
• The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB) also has a YouTube account. The first video message was posted featuring RATB Chairman Earl Devaney.
• From a SIOC perspective, I thought this quote from Nextgov referencing Chairman Devaney’s statement was interesting, as there is an opportunity to semantically link the social media contributions from many users to the financial grants in question:
  

  Board Chairman Earl Devaney will appeal to his so-called citizen inspectors general — or anyone interested in rooting out fraud, waste and abuse — through social media outlets, including the video-sharing site YouTube. Individuals who would like to broadcast miniblog entries about the site through Twitter can do so using hash tag #ARRA. “Our goal here is to provide the facts and the tools for the public to decide whether that is a good use of the public’s money,” Devaney said in an interview with Nextgov earlier in September. “We’re going to put the facts and the tools up so that people can mash it up.” The functions should allow citizens to draw useful observations, such as, “That’s the mayor’s brother in law — I’m going to call the Recovery Board,” he said.

  .

I previously gave some initial ideas about how grant feed data (following the Wilde / Kansa / Yee model) can be linked with user contributions using SIOC and FOAF. See this picture for an example. We also have a recently-created Linked Government Data initiative at DERI, NUI Galway carrying out research in this area.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Earl Devaney, English, Internet forum, On the Web, Online Communities, SIOC, Social network, YouTube, twitter

Good news for fans of OpenCalais and investigative journalism alike.

The DocumentCloud initiative – winner of this year’s largest grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation – has lined up some two dozen partners, everyone from Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, to the ACLU National Security Project, The National Security Archive, the Center for Investigative Reporting and many more.

DocumentCloud is a unique online resource – found at http://www.documentcloud.org - that will provide public access to news reporters’ original source materials.  It will debut in a beta version by the end of this year.

Here are some of the stories that resulted from the news. Please help us share them with friends to let everyone know that this powerful tool for citizen journalism is on the way.

Nieman Journalism Lab: DocumentCloud adds impressive list of investigative journalism outfits.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/documentcloud-adds-impressive-list-of-investigative-journalism-outfits/

Journalism.co.uk: Thomson Reuters partners KNC winner DocumentCloud

http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/535928.php

The Knight Foundation: More news from DocumentCloud

http://www.knightblog.org/more-news-from-documentcloud/

NYConvergence: Newspapers, mags, non-profits partner with DocumentCloud

http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/535928.php

Editor’s Weblog: OpenCalais joins DocumentCloud; set to host a wealth of primary sources. http://www.editorsweblog.org/multimedia/2009/09/opencalais_joins_documentcloud_set_to_ho.php

The New York Observer: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, WNYC, More Join Data Archive Experiment DocumentCloud.
http://www.observer.com/2009/media/atlantic-new-yorker-mother-jones-wnyc-more-join-data-archive-experiment-documentcloud

English, Official Blog

There is a permanent discussion on the current status and prospects of semantic processing (see a previous post by Javier): whether it is now ready for the masses, still in the lab for a sizable future, or being phased out because it did not fullfill its initial promise (i.e., it got stuck in the Trough of Disillusionment).

My current stance on this is that the grand unified vision of the overall Semantic Web is likely to remain a vision for a significant amount of time (Linked Data progress notwithstanding). At the same time I also expect semantic processing to get used within information systems almost as a commodity. However it will be in the form of “semantic islands”,capable of processing rich information of increasingly higher volumes, but interacting with the sorroundings in more traditional ways. It’s the usual way of getting a foothold from where to grow, while not disrupting the environment too much (i.e. an “incremental revolution”). It will be part of the fabric, and in being so it will compete with alternate solutions such as the usual suspects (the traditional RDBMs) or the new kid in town (the key-value stores).

Now, the issue is: how do you sell one of this “islands”? In other words, how can you convince a client (or a management layer) that they should invest in a semantic processing module (new thing, less proven, sounds advanced but maybe too advanced to be real) for their concrete data processing/mining/etc need?

First let’s clarify what I’m referring to when I talk about a “semantic solution”. I mean the “hardcore concept” of ontology-based processing, querying and inferencing with a Knowledge Base, generally throwing in all the standard soup of RDF, OWL, SPARQL, triple stores, you name it. Which means I’m excluding two particular semantic-like systems:

• Processing of web-based structured information such as RDFa or microformats, which can be gathered with a framework like the ones provided by Yahoo!’s Search Monkey and Google’s Rich Snippets. Though the data can be considered semantic, it is usually processed in ’simple’ ways (e.g. for structured presentation purposes). In summary, it is a way to consume semantic data, not to process it (note that applications using Linked Data are not in this group, that is a different beast)

• Extraction of semantic data from text or text-like sources, in other words, from mostly unstructured data, probably by using technology related to NLP (Natural Language Processing) and/or statistical pattern recognition (machine learning). This is exemplified by applications such as Open Calais (which works mostly as a Named Entity Recognition service). In this case those applications are producing semantic data, but not necessarily processing it.

In other words, to qualify as a “semantic island” an application needs to mostly work internally with semantic data, but not necessarily to produce or consume it (though obviosuly at some point something will be done with the result). So here’s the catch: most, if not all, what can be done within that semantic island can be also done through other “traditional” means: once you have the structured semantic data, store it in an RDBMS, use standard ways of querying it and develop application code that hooks to the database to perform the analytics needed. It works. Inferencing can also be reduced to plain procedural programming (it’s a matter of re-scheduling processes and throwing in lines of code), and all in all, the resulting run-of-the-mill module would probably consume less resources and work faster than a pure semantic module anyway (given the current maturity of Triple Stores).

So, what are then the advantages of the semantic way? Just think of having two demos of a given processing “island”, one semantic and the other non-semantic, running side-by-side. Taken as black boxes, would anyone notice the difference?

I can only think of two arguments (which are both variants on the same idea):

1. Versatility: semantic apps are more malleable, and can be better tailored to the problem at hand. As I said above, any of the approaches will work, but maybe the semantic approach can be made more precise, thus potentially offering better results.

2. Upgrade path: a big selling point is that semantics separates more clearly the infrastructure (KB, rule engine, etc) from the data and the logic associated to it (ontology, rules). Evolving a semantic system can be done by modifying the semantic structures, updating rules, etc, a task that (if it has been properly done) is always more fluid than modifying a RDBM schema and hacking code around it.

The point is: is that convincing enough? Specially when you factor in that, for the semantic option, you need to involve more specialized (and harder to find) development staff. Moreover, those features are much harder to show in a demo.

Applications, English, Semantic Web, Spanish, Technologies, Trends

In the last years we have passed from a situation characterized by the shortage of information in which “information is power”, to a situation in which the abundance of information starts to be a problem. Since Internet has been settled as the most important way of communication, and the Web 2.0 is a successful phenomenon, we have in our hand much more information than we can process. We are a click away of the news (newspapers, blogs), report analysts on all the topics, pages of patents, commercial information of the companies, opinions of the consumers, and hear live conversations in diverse degrees of formalism.

 

It is possible to state that we are drowning in information. Providing this situation, Internet will evolve to facilitate the life to the users, and no longer will be considered as a repository where all information is stored and accessed more or less easily by means of the search engines. The growth of the information has been so huge during the last years, and all seems to indicate that it will continue in this way in the future, that Internet will have to adapt itself and to be converted into a tool orientated to help the user in his daily activities.

 

This will need an evolution in the Internet approach, passing from a model based on storage of text to a model of storage of concepts. At present, the semantic technologies allow to store concepts in databases, and trends as “linked data”, will allow us to consider the information as data related to other data. These two concepts have fixed the bases of a new paradigm of information treatment with the main characteristic that the information stops being considered as flat text, to include a meaning. This fact, will allow the information systems to have the possibility of contextualizing the information, which means that they could offer it to the user in a suitable way at the right time.

 

Though these technologies have a high level of development, still it will be necessary y in the next years a maturing process to find the most suitable way to move them into the market. In a decade they could set up the base for a new concept in Internet: your personal assistant. This supposes that Internet must host tools with a more active character, capable of analyzing the present information in the Web and show it to the user adapted according to his context. The applications of this concept will be amazing: to organize the time, to plan meetings, to prepare the work… In fact, all the activities specific of a personal assistant that thanks to semantic technologies can be available to everyone. 

In the following video, some of the scenes show how the technology can play the role of a personal assistant in the future.

English, Spanish, Uncategorized

The NYT reviewed Logicomix by writer Apostolos Doxiadis and Berkeley CS professor Christos Papadimitriou.

“First published last year in Greece (where it became a surprise best seller), the comic book — er, graphic novel? — is the brainchild of Apostolos Doxiadis, previously the author of a not-bad mathematical fiction called “Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture.” For expert assistance on logic, Doxiadis called on his friend Christos Papadimitriou, a professor of computer science at Berkeley and the author of a novel about Alan Turing.”

It looks great. Amazon is out of stock for the harccover version, but there are other online sources that have copies and I’ve ordered one for the ebiquity lab. The paperback version will be released on Monday.

Here’s how the Logicomix site describes it.

“Covering a span of sixty years, the graphic novel Logicomix was inspired by the epic story of the quest for the Foundations of Mathematics.

This was a heroic intellectual adventure most of whose protagonists paid the price of knowledge with extreme personal suffering and even insanity. The book tells its tale in an engaging way, at the same time complex and accessible. It grounds the philosophical struggles on the undercurrent of personal emotional turmoil, as well as the momentous historical events and ideological battles which gave rise to them.

The role of narrator is given to the most eloquent and spirited of the story’s protagonists, the great logician, philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. It is through his eyes that the plights of such great thinkers as Frege, Hilbert, Poincaré, Wittgenstein and Gödel come to life, and through his own passionate involvement in the quest that the various narrative strands come together.”

CS, English, General

After the vacation period, Semantic Technologies come back to the arena with force in different areas:

• Application of semantic technologies to search activity is always a hot point, with news appearing continuously.  Primal Fusion has announced advances in their search engine to infer meaning from the words used to conduct an online search. This company was Founded in 2004, and joins to others that are working with the same goal. Robin Li, the CEO of Baidu, the most important search engine in China with more of 3 hundred million users in this country (more that all the population of the USA), gave a conference about the business model of Baidu and about his vision of search in the future, giving big importance to the semantic technologies for the companies that want to compete on this area.

 

• Application of semantic technologies to concrete industries continue its growth, for example in the area of pharmaceutical companies, BioFharma that has announced that they will use Cambridge Semantics’ Anzo suite “because of its ability to deliver tools that are not only powerful, but also practical, usable, flexible, and scalable,”. In the field of health the announcement of Netbase Solutions of the tool  “Health base semantic search” has been reported by several media

 

 

• The possibilities of Semantic technologies to make innovation easier has been raised by the company Invention Machine, a leading provider of innovation software that has announced the availability of Invention Machine Goldfire 5.5, a platform to enhance product innovation

 

• From the technological point of view we can highlight the utilization of Open Calais by Oracle to integrate semantic data into workflows.

 

• Among the curious news, I recommend this article from MIT News about how to improve eGoverment and how Semantic Technologies will play a role in this evolution.

English, Spanish, Uncategorized

After the vacation period, Semantic Technologies come back to the arena with force in different areas:

• Application of semantic technologies to search activity is always a hot point, with news appearing continuously.  Primal Fusion has announced advances in their search engine to infer meaning from the words used to conduct an online search. This company was Founded in 2004, and joins to others that are working with the same goal. Robin Li, the CEO of Baidu, the most important search engine in China with more of 3 hundred million users in this country (more that all the population of the USA), gave a conference about the business model of Baidu and about his vision of search in the future, giving big importance to the semantic technologies for the companies that want to compete on this area.

 

• Application of semantic technologies to concrete industries continue its growth, for example in the area of pharmaceutical companies, BioFharma that has announced that they will use Cambridge Semantics’ Anzo suite “because of its ability to deliver tools that are not only powerful, but also practical, usable, flexible, and scalable,”. In the field of health the announcement of Netbase Solutions of the tool  “Health base semantic search” has been reported by several media

 

 

• The possibilities of Semantic technologies to make innovation easier has been raised by the company Invention Machine, a leading provider of innovation software that has announced the availability of Invention Machine Goldfire 5.5, a platform to enhance product innovation

 

• From the technological point of view we can highlight the utilization of Open Calais by Oracle to integrate semantic data into workflows.

 

• Among the curious news, I recommend this article from MIT News about how to improve eGoverment and how Semantic Technologies will play a role in this evolution.

English, Spanish, Uncategorized

I will give a talk about the relevance of Semantic Web and Linked Data for news publishers at this year’s IFRA summit in Vienna on October 15, 2009. IFRA is the World Association of Newspapers and News publishers and within their Technical Group Publishing they are starting to deal with Semantic Web. Further invited speakers are Michael Steidl (IPTC) and Robert Schmidt-Nia (dpa mediatechnology).

Calls & Competitions, Conferences & Events, English, Internet & Media, Knowledge Management, Mashups & Web services, World Association of Newspapers, social software

It looks like the release of Conrad Barski’s long awaited graphic text on Lisp is getting closer. You can now order it from Amazon, although the publication date is listed as April 28, 2010. Conrad’s site says that it’s “due out this Fall” and the publisher’s site says “Coming March 2010″. I hope we don’t have to wait until next Spring.

Conrad Barski, Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!, No Starch Press, 2010.

Here’s the description from the publisher’s site.

“Lisp is a uniquely powerful programming language that, despite its academic reputation, is actually very practical. Land of Lisp brings the language into the real world, teaching Lisp by showing you how to write several complete Lisp-based games, including a text adventure, an evolution simulation, and a robot battle. While building these games, you’ll learn the core concepts of Lisp programming, such as data types, recursion, input/output, object-oriented programming, and macros. And thanks to the power of Lisp, the code is short. Rather than bogging things down with reference information that is easily found online, Land of Lisp focuses on using Lisp for real programming. While not a cartoon guide like our Manga Guides, the book is filled with author Conrad Barski’s brilliant Lisp cartoons (featuring a Lisp alien and other characters) that are sure to appeal to many Lisp fans and, in the tradition of all No Starch Press titles, make the learning more fun.”

For more information, see the comments on Hacker News.

English, General

There will be a series of events around the Semantic Web & Linked Data in Vienna and Graz at the end of this year. This is a comprehensive list of all of these events, which might help you to make a decision to come to Austria:

• Linked Data Camp (Vienna, November 30 – December 1) with keynotes from Leigh Dodds (Talis) and Michael Hausenblas (DERI Galway) – Register here!
• Vienna Semantic Web Meetup (Vienna, November 30) as evening event of the Linked Data Camp
• SAMT 2009 – 4 th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (Graz, December 2-4) with keynote from Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo!)
• ESTC 2009 – 3 rd European Semantic Technology Conference (Vienna, December 2-3) with keynote from Susie Stephens (Johnson&Johnson)

The Jackson tribute might have been a flop for Vienna, but this is history! So, what are you waiting for – come & join the party!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Linked Data Meetup in London (cloudofdata.com)

Austria, Conferences & Events, English, Graz, Linked Data, Linked Data & Open Data, Talis Group, Vienna

In this podcast, Sarah Bartlett talks with Gordon Hunt, University Librarian at the University of the West of Scotland.

As Gordon explains in the podcast, the University of the West of Scotland is a very young institution, having come into existence in 2007, as a result of an institutional merger.

We talk about the challenges of running a multi-site library against a backdrop of significant organisational change, ensuring that an equivalence of experience is obtained for all students regardless of location. We take a broad view of how the library works with the rest of the university and helps to meet corporate objectives. In so doing, we discuss a wide range of topics such as the changing role of the library in teaching and learning, the budgetary challenges of the present and future, internal partnerships, external community engagement, and the student experience.

We also consider the distinctiveness of Scottish Higher Education, and how the Scottish context also impacts the library’s operations.

English, Libraries, Meet The Library, Podcast, UK Library Podcast

At Monday’s Mobile Learning conference, I had little idea of what to expect from a session entitled “Even august” by Melissa Highton from the Learning Technologies Group at the University of Oxford. However, since I visited Adam Marshall at the same institution for some VLE research I was carrying out this year, I’ve been very intrigued by the adoption of learning technologies at Oxford.

The title, in fact, came from this brief excerpt from the Demos Edgeless University report, which I blogged about here.

“Even august institutions such as University of Oxford now produce podcasts.”

Melissa speculated briefly on the sentiments that might lie behind such a statement (is the very idea of Open Oxford an oxymoron?) before turning her attention to the complexities of the relationship between mobile learning and a 900 year old university that is almost defined by its physical estate. The quads; the punts; the Bodleian… all of this combines to form an environment that students have deliberately chosen, and they don’t want Oxford to mess with it.

And yet, once you start delving into the learning technology initiatives underway there, you start having to re-examine your preconceptions of what Oxford University really is. For a start, 15,000 people a year participate in one of Oxford’s Continuing Education courses. Whilst the commercial VLEs can’t be adopted by an institution where the underpinning concept of a module has no meaning (this was one of the findings of my conversation with Adam Marshall), Oxford is instead making good use of collaborative data environments and academics and students work together in them. It shouldn’t be surprising, as Melissa pointed out, that world-class academics and students researching in a world-class institution should be making use of world-class technologies.

For me though, the real surprises lie in the fundamentals of the institution and how eminently suitable they are to a model for elearning. As Melissa explained, at Oxford the pedagogy is based largely on small group teaching plus extensive one-to-one contact. Lectures are entirely optional at Oxford, negotiated with your tutor on the basis of your individual learning life. In this intensive environment, as many as half of the students may be publishing in peer review journals by their final undergraduate year. Meanwhile, dozens of research lectures, open to all, take place every evening, as Oxford’s researchers communicate their latest findings.

As Melissa underlined her mission of ensuring that Oxford’s students are free range and find their own paths through the immersive learning environment, it became clear to me that Oxford is the template for Education 2.0. If online learning could replicate that model, it would attain its own ideal, in my opinion.

To reinforce the idea of Oxford as an institution that really gets the whole 2.0 thing, Melissa outlined four projects currently underway:

iTunes U: 200 of Oxford academics are willingly recording their free talks onto podcasts, 500 of which, covering all disciplines, are now freely available on iTunes U as well as on a non-proprietary portal. They hit one million downloads after 44 weeks. The academics readily understand that tthis is an appropriate way of communicating their knowledge. Meanwhile the Centre adds value in terms of metadata, technical standards, legal sign-off and workflows.

Erewhon: Using geo data, around 1300 locations have been mapped in Oxford. As a result, students can now identify, using their mobile device, the nearest available copy of a book on their reading list, bearing mind the user entitlement to and opening hours of the library, and also the distance between the student’s current location and specific libraries.

Steeple Project: An aggregated podcast fed around the big questions and topics.

Open Spires: Large chunks of Oxford content, licensed as Open Educational Resources, thus facilitating reuse.

What you get, then, is mobile learning, personalised but not isolated, in the context of a vibrant learning community. So all in all, Oxford University may be set in its physical location, but there’s a recognition that its content and learners are mobile, informed by a sense of place, as Melissa summarised.

CILIP MMIT, Education, English, Libraries

The mission of the Provenance Incubator Group, is to provide a state-of-the art understanding and develop a roadmap in the area of provenance for Semantic Web technologies, development, and possible standardization. This includes:

• Developing requirements for representing explicit provenance information of Semantic Web resources
• Developing use cases for accessing and reasoning about provenance information
• Identifying the issues in provenance that are a direct concern to the Semantic Web
• Identifying starting points for provenance representations
• Articulating the relationships between provenance on the Semantic Web and ongoing work on trust and provenance in other areas
• Identifying elements of a provenance architecture on the Semantic Web that need and would benefit from Standardization (eg, at the W3C)

The group will be chaired by Yolanda Gil. The charter of the group is publicly available.

Activity news, English

With more than a dozen implementations of OWL 2 reported, the W3C OWL Working Group has published its OWL 2 Web Ontology Language as a Proposed Recommendation. OWL 2 is a compatible extension to OWL 1, providing additional features for people using ontologies. The OWL 2 document set contains 13 documents, of which 4 are instructional: overview, primer, new features and rationale, and quick reference. The rdf:PlainLiteral datatype, developed for use by OWL 2 and RIF, is also a Proposed Recommendation.

Activity news, English

Stuff has happened since last I posted here. I blame Twitter for the delays; see @candp or @kendall for more…

• We just about finished porting JSpace to run in web browser using Vaadin; I think this will be a game changer in the intersection between faceted browsing and Linked Data; stay tuned for demo site and a beta…
• Our PelletDb—Pellet and Oracle integrated reasoner—beta period ends on October 1st; see the site for more info.
• We’ve been doing some fun bizdev deals that we’ll announce by the end of 2010; good stuff coming soon.
• OWL 2 just became a Proposed Recommendation at W3C.
• OWLED 2009 and ISWC 2009 both coming up soon in DC, end of October. Should be lots of fun.
• We got two papers accepted at OWLED: Jiao Tao and Evren Sirin on formal semantics of OWL integrity constraints; Markus Stocker and Evren Sirin on qualitative spatial reasoning extension in Pellet (i.e,. PelletSpatial), a new prototype we released
• Blazej Bulka, an automated planning expert, and fresh, new PhD from UMD joined C&P in August. Blazej is already crushing on a daily basis and we’re lucky to have him.
• Some pretty cool bizdev stuff that we’ll announce by end of the year that is really exciting.

This blog is like George Costanza: it’s back, baby!

CandP, English

Muy buenas, las preguntas que me formulaban hace unas semanas, en una entrevista para la revista Computing sobre web 3.0 – web semántica.

La guardaba desde hace tiempo para una ocasión especial, como lo es el cambio de look de El caparazón.

Espero que os guste.

“¿Qué novedades plantea la Web 3.0? ¿Qué diferencias existe con respecto a la Web 2.0?

No existe un consenso alrededor de lo que es web 3.0. De hecho, una de las definiciones típicas es la que constata un hecho puramente cronológico: Web 3.0 es la tercera década de la web. Si significará o no un cambio cualitativo, tema que es indudable para la web 2.0 o social, es algo que no sabemos aún. Sí podemos describir algunas de las tendencias hacia las que parece dirigirse la web de hoy. Algunas representan características más disruptivas que otras (web semántica) respecto a lo que tenemos hoy.

Otras, que voy comentando en El caparazón, serían según los analistas más relevantes en el ámbito anglosajón, cosas como la web en tiempo real, la web ubicua(con conceptos como Cloud Computing o Telefonía móvil), el Embodiment, la Internet de las cosas o la web contextual (entendiendo la que personaliza la experiencia del usuario según su contexto social, geográfico, etc…).

Quizás la teoría más extrema al respecto sea la de la Singularidad, que según la definición oficial supone que el progreso tecnológico y el cambio social se acelerarán debido al desarrollo de inteligencia super humana, cambiando nuestro ambiente de manera tal, que cualquier ser humano anterior sería incapaz de comprender o predecir.

Recomiendo la serie de vídeos de Simón Hergueta, además de otros sobre el tema que recopilaba en una entrada reciente (al final).

¿Qué es la web semántica y qué retos plantea?

La web semántica es aquella que se construye en un lenguaje que los ordenadores pueden “entender”. Se refiere, más allá de la transmisión de señales, a la comunicación.

Es una web de datos escritos en formatos interoperables, de bases de datos compatibles que construyen algo así como ámbitos conceptuales globales en toda la web. Son datos, dicho de otro modo, que los ordenadores pueden interpretar, relacionar con otros, etc… para devolvernos resultados o una experiencia de usuario más cómoda y satisfactoria.

Para que todo ello sea posible (y ese es el reto básico), debe definirse un estándar (el W3C es el organismo encargado de ello) además de traducir los conceptos del mundo a códigos informáticos (ontologías, otro de los retos). RDF y derivados son formas de marcar el contenido de cualquier página web de forma semántica.

El reto está en la interoperabilidad (la necesidad de que todas las páginas se adapten a un mismo lenguaje), además de en la complejidad, a la hora de marcar contenidos e incluso de definirlos.

Es, sin duda, una web mucho más costosa pero más eficiente a largo plazo.

¿Qué iniciativas hay interesantes sobre esa web semántica? En España hay algunos ejemplos?

Hay muchas iniciativas interesantes en Intranets o en el ámbito de la gestión del conocimiento corporativo. También en aplicaciones en sectores “verticales”, en los que es más posible la creación de ontologías, el trabajo de base para el funcionamiento de la web semántica. El turismo sería uno de los más beneficiados al respecto. El sector farmacéutico, la automoción son otros de los que el W3C recoge en su directorio (incluyo enlace a la presentación correspondiente en español al final)

Menos frecuentes son a nivel “mainstream” o generalizado, aunque Wikipedia, ahora Bing y el mismo Google estén trabajando ya con algoritmos semánticos. Como aplicaciones de éxito podemos hablar de Twine, una herramienta intermedia entre lo social (o de intereses), propio de la web 2.0, y la web semántica, en el sentido de organizar la información que recibe (los marcadores sociales) con ayuda de código semántico. El resultado es bastante bueno, logrando recomendaciones automáticas bastante adaptadas a nuestros intereses.

Es uno de los aspectos que trabajo con mayor profundidad en presentaciones, talleres, seminarios, etc… porque creo que el futuro éxito de esta web “mejor” depende, para un usuario cada vez más formado y exigente, del conocimiento de las ventajas que este tipo de acercamiento constituye. Tenéis, también al final de la entrevista, en los últimos slides de la última presentación que preparé sobre el tema de la web semántica – 3.0, muchos otros ejemplos de aplicaciones.

En su opinión, ¿Qué papel deberían jugar los gobiernos y la iniciativa privada para consolidar este tipo de web?

El papel de los organismos reguladores, de instituciones (el W3C es la fundamental) que definan los estándares o ese lenguaje común, es crucial. Tim Berners-Lee trabaja en la “linked data web”, la web de los datos enlazados o la traducción de bases de datos públicas en distintos gobiernos a los estándares, para gobiernos como el de UK o EEUU.

Son muchos los organismos, las instituciones y empresas privadas que están entrando en la “Linked data cloud” (nube de datos interoperables). Sería, por decirlo de forma metafórica, hacer una apuesta por formar parte de un mundo web ordenado.

Existen gráficos acerca de su evolución en términos de número de agentes implicados y el crecimiento resulta muy importante en 2009, aunque está lejos aún de ser mainstream.

Podéis observar el tema en los gráficos. El primero corresponde a 2008, el segundo a 2009:

¿Qué funciones tendrá la publicidad en este contexto? ¿cómo encajará?

La publicidad semántica puede mejorar la precisión, la relevancia de la actual publicidad contextual. Esto ser entiende mejor desde una afirmación de Winer: “La publicidad perfectamente adaptada a nuestros intereses es contenido”, considerada información y no spam.

Puede ser, de hecho, uno de los ámbitos en los que la aplicación de este tipo de tecnologías puede resultar más rentable.

Se trata de ir más allá de los sistemas de “Behavioral advertising” o publicidad según nuestro comportamiento como internautas (basados en cosas como introducir cookies y software “espía”, entre otros muchos atentados a nuestra privacidad).

Hakia, una de las startups de lo semántico decía al respecto: “Si un 90% del tráfico de tu sitio viene de los buscadores, es porque los lectores de tu contenido vienen con una “orientación mental de búsqueda”. La publicidad relevante corresponde a esta mentalidad. Si los resultados son pobres en cuanto a relevancia y los anuncios parecen malos, generarás mala imagen en tu espacio, como de la publicidad en internet en general”

Existen ejemplos muy aparentes acerca de la diferencia entre bloques de publicidad de ambos tipos. Es uno de los recursos frecuentes en formación de este tipo de tendencias.

¿Llegará la rentabilidad a este tipo de iniciativas?

Demuestran ya su rentabilidad en Intranets, son inversiones a largo plazo. Pero la rentabilidad es precisamente uno de los principales obstáculos a esta “web mejor”. Ayuda mucho a comprender la evolución de la web y su futuro, recordar cómo la web semántica es tan poco web 3.0 en el sentido cronológico que la definíamos al principio, que surgió, de hecho, antes de la 2.0 actual (también en esto existen matices y definiciones del momento actual como de transición, 2.5…).

Tim Berners Lee pensó la web como algo mucho más elaborado que lo que tenemos ahora. Han sido criterios prácticos, la prioridad en el abaratamiento de los costes, las “prisas” en la construcción de una web social mínimamente rentable, los que han guiado la actual arquitectura, técnicamente muy mejorable, de la WWW. Y es posible que el mismo imperativo económico frene su evolución.

Es así, de hecho, si tenemos en cuenta la aparente resistencia de Google, que argumentaba hasta hace muy poco que la semweb era simplemente imposible, de muy difícil (y costosa) implementación. Es difícil, cuando todavía están por definir los modelos de negocio de la web social, cuando todavía es complicado rentabilizar de modos alternativos toda la oferta de contenidos, aplicaciones y servicios libres, apostar por sistemas mucho más difíciles de implementar que cosas tan simples a nivel tecnológico como Twitter, con una inversión inicial (y por tanto una asunción de riesgo) mínima.

Aún así, la competencia, el hecho de que dotar a nivel real o como estrategia de márketing, del adjetivo “semántico” a cualquier aplicación (de hecho, fue uno de los términos que generó ruido sin ser del todo adecuado para al lanzamiento de Wolfram Alpha), le añada valor en un mercado colapsado, puede ayudar a avanzar en la dirección correcta. Es el caso del propio Google, que siguiendo con lo anterior, estaría incorporando desde hace un tiempo, coincidiendo con la aparición de Bing (motor de búsqueda de Microsoft, que previamente adquiría Powerset, un buscador semántico) algoritmos semánticos a su sistema.

¿La Web 3.0 es viable a día de hoy desde un punto de vista tecnológico? ¿Están habilitados y disponibles todos los recursos que necesita?

Si obviamos la metafísica, las teorías de la singularidad que suponen la aparición de una inteligencia cibernética independiente de la humana y que, como veíamos, se inscriben también en la cultura de la web 3.0 y semántica (o inteligente), podemos contestar de forma afirmativa a esta pregunta.

Los recursos que precisa la web semántica van construyéndose día a día. Si hace unos años eran las Universidades los únicos agentes encargados de escribir, de definir las ontologías necesarias para su evolución, hoy son gobiernos, empresas privadas, organizaciones públicas las que también contribuyen.

No es fácil, pero también son cada vez más sofisticadas las herramientas de semantización de los UGC (contenidos generados por el usuario) propios de la web social. La web 3.0 entendida como semántica es una tendencia que abarcará posiblemente los próximos, ya no 10 (recordemos la definición como tercera década de la web) sino posiblemente 20 años que vienen. La web semántica es un proceso, una forma de seguir construyendo la web, no un resultado posible al 100% en cualquier momento concreto.”

Anteriores sobre web semántica – web 3.0:

• http://www.slideshare.net/dreig/web-30-web-semntica
• http://www.dreig.eu/caparazon/2009/07/12/web-semantica-linked-data-web-ultimos-conceptos-tendencias-y-aplicaciones/
• http://www.dreig.eu/caparazon/2009/07/02/linked-data-web-la-web-de-los-datos-enlazados-manana-en-novadors/
• http://www.slideshare.net/dreig/experiencias-exito-w3c-web-semntica-presentation
• Slidecast (con voz además de la presentación): http://www.dreig.eu/caparazon/2009/06/18/video-conferencia-fundacion-chandra-evolucion-del-conocimiento-en-la-web/
• http://www.dreig.eu/caparazon/2009/04/12/4-videos-imprescindibles-para-entender-la-web-30/
• http://www.dreig.eu/caparazon/2008/11/14/publicidad-contextual-estandar-vs-publicidad-semantica/

2009, Bing, Evolución, Google, Planeta educativo, RDF, Spanish, TRABAJOS DESTACADOS, W3C, Web 3.0, Web Semántica, cibercultura, cloud computing-web 4.0, colaboraciones, desarrollo-web, dolors reig, dreig, entrevistas, filosofía, filtrado de contenidos, fundamentos, futurismo, futuro web, herramientas semánticas, innovación, inteligencia colectiva, linked data web, semweb, singularidad, twine, web3.0, zeitgeist evolución

La  8ª Conferencia Internacional sobre Web Semántica (ISWC 2009) tendrá lugar del 25 al 29 de Octubre próximos en  Fairfax, Virginia, en las afueras de Washington D.C.

Aún estás a tiempo de registrarte aquí.

ISWC es el mayor foro internacional en el que se muestran las más recientes innovaciones acerca de todos los aspectos de la Web Semántica.

Los datos vitales de la conferencia son estos:

• 3 ponentes invitados- Patrick Hayes, del Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Nova Spivack,  de Radar Networks, y Tom Mitchell, de la Universidad Carnegie-Mellon.
• 43 documentos de investigación
• 15 documentos de uso de la Web Semántica
• 17 talleres
• 12 Tutoriales
• 56 Posters y Demostraciones
• Exposición acerca de la industria
• Dos conferencias simultáneas
  • RR 2009: Tercera Conferencia Internacional acerca del Razonamiento Web y Sistemas Reglados
  • OWLED 2009: OWL: Experiencias y Directrices, Quinto Taller Internacional

Las Conferencias Internacionales Sobre Web Semántica (ISWC) las organizan y gestionan la Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA).

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Spanish, Web 3.0, Web Semántica, Wiki, internet

If anyone ever delivered the bigger picture at a conference, it was John Traxler from University of Wolverhampton. The insights came so thick and fast at one point that I struggled to take them in.

Traxler’s opening point was that mobile learning can enable us to take learning to communities that are out of reach in any one of a number of ways. This can be geographical – there are parts of Southern Africa where there is only infrequent mains electricity, for example. But constituents such as NEETs (disengaged 18-24 year olds who are in neither the formal education system or employment) are closer to home.

With such users, though, there’s a risk of what Traxler calls the “deficit model” or using technology to make up for something not there. Whereas we want to use technologies to transform enrich and extend the education experience. In a PDA pilot study, supporting fieldwork in the Lake District, the immediate value of preserving data when it rains (no soaking wet paper) were overshadowed by more transformational benefits – on the same field study, data was collected, and because mobile devices were in use, analysis on the fly was enabled, and as a result, participants were able to take more measurements in situ on the basis of findings thus far.

Traxler also gave a very realistic picture of the challenges that mobile learning faces at the current juncture. Adoption has not scaled. Instead, all we’ve seen over the past few years is small projects, with small groups of enthusiasts. Not all projects receiving funding have proven sustainable, and in the new funding climate, we need to be measured and stop throwing money at education in the vague hope that it will get better.

He also made some very interesting observations about the nature of mobile devices themselves. One problem, Traxler explains, is that mobile devices are (paradoxically) fixed in nature – you can’t plug things into them. What this means is that iPods, PlayStation consoles, SatNav devices and so on all have a dedicated purpose. You can’t turn a sat nav into an MP3 player, for example. Contrast that with the multi-purpose PC. This is very problematic for elearning. Related to this, mobile technology currently lacks the stability of PC platforms, and so we can’t build onto the device in the same way that we can with a PC.

Andy Powell from Eduserv noted that with the iPhone, the application store is the plug-in. So in this instance, it is software that is providing the plugability rather than hardware. He added that larger devices are now browser-enabled, so that may turn out to be the universal element that transforms the possibilities for mobile devices in education.

CILIP MMIT, Education, English

The New York Times reports that the data for the Netflix Prize 2 will include more information about the anonymous users:

“Netflix was so pleased with the results of its first contest that it announced a second one on Monday. The new contest will present contestants with demographic and behavioral data, including renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies — but not ratings. Contestants will then have to predict which movies those people will like.”

As others have noted this will make it much easier to “de-anonymize” individuals in the collection.

As an experiment, I checked the zip code where I grew up and found that it had about 3900 people in the 2000 census. So, given an age and gender you would have a set of about 40 people. With just a little bit of additional information, one could narrow this to a specific individual.

For example, Narayanan and Shmatikov showed (Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets) that this could be done with the dataset from the first Netflix Grand Prize by mining information from IMDB. Think of how much more powerful such attacks would be with the new dataset.

English, privacy, social media

John Trinder from University of Glasgow rattled through some key historical developments in mobile technology from Apple’s Newton MessagePad in 1993 onwards, but once he’d listed some of the array of mobile devices available in 2009, it was time for a second key message of the CILIP Multimedia and Technology Group Annual Conference – namely, that there’s no “best” mobile technology; there’s only the best one for a specific context.

He spoke about a recent project at University of Glasgow, evaluating students’ use of mobile devices through automatic logging. He reinforced a point that many of us are aware of – students aren’t as techno-savvy as they may appear or claim. They also have limited pocket space (I’m assuming that this applies only to male students) and this can be a problem if the institution gives a mobile device to its students for learning purposes, because if some other mobile device comes into fashion, then the institutional device can find itself relegated into oblivion. This is what happened on this project when the iPod came along.

John spoke engagingly about a number of emerging technologies that are impacting the use of mobile devices, including QR codes, RFID, GPS and Augmented Reality. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in going home and trying out Augmented Reality technology on the web for myself. John believes that Augmented Reality in particular will give mobile devices a kick, and get many more people interested in them.

He also had some harsh words to say about the obstacles to widespread adoption of mobile learning in Higher Education. He believes that development by committee is endemic in the sector, but in reality, there’s just not the time for this. He also asked the audience whether they had an Innovation Prevention department in their institution. A number of people shouted out “Yes! IT!”

On the other hand, he advised sensitivity towards the possibility that fear of technology may drive students away immediately and possibly permanently. Today’s student body is very much a diverse one, and we have to take into account varying degrees of comfort with mobile devices.

CILIP MMIT, Education, English

Paul Miller has just put online our semantic web gang podcast for this month. We were joined by Brand Niemann of the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for a discussion on the efforts to apply semantic technologies to Government...

English, Semantic Web

The CILIP Multimedia & Technology Group Annual Conference, which took place yesterday at Aston University (a 10 minute train journey for me – just what the doctor ordered on a Monday morning), posed the question “Mobile learning: what exactly is it?”. And Mike Sharples from University of Nottingham, the man who wrote the definition on Wikipedia, was on hand with an immediate answer:

Any sort of learning that happens when the learner is not at a fixed, predetermined location, or learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of the learning opportunities offered by mobile technologies.

But thankfully we didn’t simply pack our bags at that point, as Mike (and the speakers who followed) had a lot more value to deliver.

For a start, as Mike elaborated, mobile learning is a lot older than you think. There have been exemplars of hand-held devices in classrooms for decades now, and according to Mike, mobile learning is in its third phase of development, which is characterised as “ambient learning”, or taking the every day world and enhancing it. The application of augmented reality technologies to the learning environment is a good example of this.

My important take-away from Mike’s session, though, was the need to focus on new types of learning experiences, and not just enhance current experiences. This was one of those uber-messages that subsequent speakers and contributors from the floor build on throughout an event.

By way of example, Mike outlined a series of classroom scenarios. In the first, three students are engaged in a face-to-face group activity. It’s difficult to coordinate the collaboration, and there’s a strong possibility (almost an inevitability) that one person will dominate the group. This certainly resonates with me. In the second scenario, the same group now has one computer at its disposal. The group is now becoming more manageable. But invariably there’ll be one person driving, so genuine team dynamics remain elusive. In the final scenario, though, the three students all have their own mobile devices, and that’s where the fun begins…

The teacher now sets a problem, and the problem goes onto all the devices. The individual thinks for a while, formulates an answer on a strictly individual basis, and once OK is pressed, everyone can see everyone else’s answer. The group dynamic now kicks in, and everyone comes together and agrees on a shared answer. This could be one of the individual answers, or could be a new group one. The group proposal is sent to the teacher. The teacher may ask anyone to defend the group answer (just in case any one team member is tempted to take a back seat at this point).

From the audience came a very valid answer, namely, what advantage does this mobile device approach have over pen and paper? Apparently, it’s more motivating, but actually a comparative study has been carried out around this very scenario, and apparently the problem with paper was essentially one of lack of coordination – getting everyone to complete the task. The orchestration element makes the difference. Iteration is also powerful – the teacher gets a full record of the interaction.

As someone who has consistently found group work to be alternately de-energising and frustrating, I was very interested to hear about the application of technologies to tackle the sapping passivity that group work can so easily engender.

It’s also worth noting that at ALT-C earlier this month, Terry Anderson made the valuable point that group work in its current form in academia in no way replicates real-world interactions.

CILIP MMIT, Education, English