Summary of the CELT conference by Jacek Jankowski of DERI

This blog posting by Jacek Jankowski of the eLite project in the Digital Enterprise Research Cluster (DERI) provides an insight into an observer's viewpoint of the CELT conference, in June. Jacek also publishes the abstract of the paper he presented at the conference, along with his colleagues, Jarosław Dobrzański and Filip Czaja.Their paper was entitled "Adapting informal sources of knowledge to e-Learning", and they presented during one of the sessions on the Friday morning of the CELT Conference. Jaroslaw provides a useful map of how the work of several of the e-learning cluster of projects in DERI relate to each other. These include Didaskon (an on-demand composition of semantic-enabled learning objects and services), S3B (the social semantic search and browsing framework), the Informal Knowledge Harvester (IKAR), and the Notitio.us service.

If this all seems like double dutch to you, there is an overview of the work of the eLearning Cluster at Deri available on youtube, where Bill McDaniel talks with Ina O'Murchu sharing his thoughts on elearning, and the work of this Cluster in general (see below).

Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources

Alejandra has just pointed out this recently published report, by the OECD on Open Educational Resources. It is a 153 page document discusses the prevelance of individuals and organisations who are making their digital learning resources available for free.

"The report offers an overview of the rapidly changing phenomenon of Open Educational Resources and the challenges it poses for higher education. It examines reasons for individuals and institutions to share resources for free, and looks at copyright issues, sustainability and business models as well as policy implications.

This topic of Open Content follows on on from the CELT conference session on Creative Commons, Copyright, and the NDLR, where talks by Bob Clarke (UCD), Catherine Bruen (Trinity), and Maureen O’Sullivan, (NUIG) illuminated some of the issues involved. As such is it a useful supplemental reading.

The group behind the report consisted of Graham Attwell from Pontydysgu, UK, Susan D’Antoni from UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning, Knud Erik Hilding-Hamann from the Danish Technological Institute, Francis Muguet from ENSTA, France, Sally Johnstone from University of Winona, United States, and James Dalziel from Macquaire University, Australia, amongst others. During the study the Secretariat has co-operated extensively with UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning, but also with the European Schoolnet and the Open eLearning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS), a project funded by the European Commission.

Download the full report at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/7/38654317.pdf

Full Source: http://www.oecd.org/document/41/0,3343,en_2649_37455_38659497_1_1_1_37455,00.html

Design-Based Research EPSS

A link to a video collection on Design Based Research was just posted on the ITForum's mailing list by Thomas Reeves.
It points to a series of short interviews, conducted at AERA International Convention in 2006, put together by PhD students at the University of Georgia. The collection provides some specific insights from some notable researchers in the field of Design-based Research. It is a really useful resource to understand why this methodology is so helpful to those working towards understanding technology, and it's role in the learning process.

Watch a sample interview from the collection, such as the interview with Dr. Sasha Barab, (pictured right) from Indiana University, where he explains how he started in traditional research and why he felt unsatisfied with what it provided. He talks about how he moved to Design Based Research as an alternative methodology to explore the role of the student, the technology, the teacher and the learning activity.

Philosophy of Technology

Last Wednesday and Thursday, Roisin Lally and Aengus Daly, of NUI Galway organised an amazing two day conference on the Philosophy of Technology.

Don Ihde spoke as one of the keynotes at the event, and echoed some of the themes Stephen Heppell touched upon at the Learning Technologies conference. These related to ideas around sensory modalities, and how technology mediates the world for us in so many ways.

Some fascinating examples that Don Ihde drew upon included a recording from an artist/physicist by the name of Felix Hess. Hess has recorded the fluctuations of air currents (which generate sound in the inaudible infrasound end of the sonic spectrum) at 360 times the original speed, thus bringing these sounds up to audible levels. The noise of the Hess's recording that Don Ihde played during his talk sounded like a soft rain (and we know a thing or two about those in Galway, this summer). A deep droning hum that occasionally was heard was apparently the amplification of waves from storms in the distant North Atlantic, and the increased density of sounds heard about every 4 minutes was attributed to an urban population waking up and starting its day.

Don Ihde asked the question: “What if we were more scientifically multi-sensory?” In particular, he suggested that it is merely a cultural anomaly that we rely on visualisations to translate data for us, and we may have just as easily ended up using sound as our primary mechanism to interpret data. He referred to how his wife, and English language teacher used an oscilloscope to teach accents to non-native speakers- for them to see the sound, where they could not ‘hear’ differences. He made the point that you get richer knowledge by using multiple variations. Even more radically, he proposed that without technology there would be no science, as we would not have any instruments to mediate our experience (e.g. imaging technologies, telescopes, microscopes, etc.), and that science has always followed technological trajectories.

I wonder what conclusions Don Ihde would draw from NUI, Galway students’ uses of technology as part of their university ‘lifeworld’?

Visualisation and Presentation (Part 2)

Hans Rosling gave a follow-up talk at TED 2007, showing the next generation of his TrendAnalyzer software, which was subsequently bought by Google. In another stunning presentation he discusses world poverty, and ends by swallowing a sword. Seriously!

Photo-web?

Fiona has pointed out this fascinating demonstration of an amazing photographic software system (Photosynth) which has to be seen to be believed. It can link multi-scale imagery and produce complete representations from all existing images of a location on the web. Have a look at the video, it takes about 7 minutes.

Stephen Heppell's keynote

It's coming...just a wee bit of editing to be done and should be with you soon, completing the 'full set' of keynotes.....then we'll look at adding some info based on the parallel sessions and other materials online. See - all the more reason to subscribe to this blog.....

Bill McDaniel's Keynote

Bill McDaniel who works at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), here in Galway spoke about some of his perceptions of the future of learning in the digital age. Bill (who hails from Texas) previously worked for Adobe and ran a number of his own companies before he moved over here to lead the E-Learning Cluster in DERI.

DERI itself is an interesting organisation which has successfully attracted significant external funding and is the world's largest research group on the Semantic Web, working to develop the new technologies that will transform the web (into, for example, a resource that can be searched on the basis of natural language, meaning and concepts instead of straight text matching searches as at present).

Anyway, here he is:

http://www.nuigalway.ie/celt/webcasts/BillMcDaniel/BillMcDaniel.html

virtual mud bath?

Well, this weekend is, in England, the traditional time of mudbaths (photo credit), loud music and quack crystal healers that constitutes the Glastonbury festival. For geeks and those of us who live in another country (if not another world) the Guardian newspaper has teamed up with Intel to provide a three day music festival in Second Life. This might be an opportunity to give this bizarre world, constructed entirely of electrons, a try whilst also hearing some music. Of course, you will no doubt come across all sorts of strange people there - but if it gets too heavy, skip over to the education zones including the NMC Campus.

Speaking of the NMC (New Media Consortium), they have produced an entertaining promotional video for their next conference (in 2008 at Princeton University).

More keynote videos

We hope, next week, to be able to provide you with a wider range of choices for viewing the conference keynote presentations. Whilst the best quality is via the Camtasia/Flash versions, these do take a little while to get started as they need to download a fair amount of the content before they can start playing. For those who are really impatient and can't wait for the 20-30 seconds or so it takes to start (sometimes a wee bit longer if your connection bandwidth isn't great), then we'll also provide a 'streamed' version. The streamed versions are similar in layout to the iPod video files, in that the video is in a 'picture in picture' view.

Anyway, for those who want to see more now, try this from Michael Kerres:

http://www.nuigalway.ie/celt/webcasts/MichaelKerres/MichaelKerres.html

Or this, from our local Director of Computer Services, Dr. Kieran Loftus:

http://www.nuigalway.ie/celt/webcasts/KieranLoftus/KieranLoftus.html

Ray Land - Keynote presentation

Prof. Ray Land, the opening keynote speaker, is captured here in the first of our recordings to go online. We are using Camtasia to provide these (in Flash format) and when you click you will have to wait about 20 seconds or so for the recording to start, but it's worth it! Ray also wanders off camera for the first couple of minutes, rattles his microphone, etc. All well known subversive actions to challenge the AV team - but we still caught him! ;-)

You can also download the PowerPoint slides, the audio only (in MP3 format) or a video iPod file (m4v).

Enjoy and discuss.

http://www.nuigalway.ie/celt/webcasts/RayLand/RayLand.html

Visualisation and Presentation

Many folk commented about how it was great to see the confidence with which speakers like Stephen Heppell can throw away the PowerPoint crutches that so many of the rest of us are still hobbling along with. An interesting example of presentation using a statistical representation system (Gapminder) was the talk by Hans Rosling (Professor of Global Health, medical doctor and researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden - oh, and an amateur sword-swallower!) at the TED conference last year. Just look at these lovely statistics!

If you want to see some really amazing examples of what you can do with 'multi-touch' (mentioned in one of the talks), then have a look at this, also from TED last year. Now Microsoft have just released their 'surface' - also worth a look. Much better than your average coffee table - every student cafe should have one!