Berlin interview 3: Dietmar Kennepohl - Web-based Chemistry Labs

Prof. Dietmar Kennepohl of Canada's Athabasca University (their Open University) presented examples of the web-based interface that they use to allow students to access chemistry instrumentation for sample analysis. Essentially, the student can take full control of the equipment from anywhere and at anytime that suits them. Of course the equipment is preloaded with a number of different sample materials from analysis, some of which will have been sent in to the lab by the students concerned. Such remote access to labs has been growing internationally in a range of technical subjects including Electrical Engineering (indeed our own Vice-President, Ger Hurley, published a paper on this topic last year) and Astronomy. MIT has also been pursuing the development of a comprehensive network of such equipment from many institutions across the globe as part of their iLab project. I spoke briefly with Dietmar about his work.

Berlin Interview 2: Sîan Bayne

Sîan Bayne, who runs Edinburgh University's MSc in eLearning programme spoke at the final plenary session at Online Educa, where she wandered through the University's Second Life islands and spaces in a live demonstration and commented on its potential for overcoming the isolation experienced by students on distance learning programmes, providing as it does, a greater sense of 'presence' for online discussion. She did emphasise however the unheimlich nature of the SL experience: a slightly disturbing space of marionnettes, delay and the haunting background sound of the wind. I interviewed her briefly after the session.

Riots, storms and coincidences -another day in academe

Just returned from the Berlin conference and more reports and interview to follow, once I have recovered from the journey. What started out as a leisurely last day in the city ended up being a roller coaster drama. Emerging from the underground at Rudow, in order to take the express bus to the airport, I found myself surrounded by riot police and thousands of protestors beating drums, and blowing whistles with all the roads blocked off. It seemed like a counter demonstration to some other march and given that the people on the sidelines with the whistles and drums were waving red flags, green flags and various other hues, one senses that the marchers were of a somewhat less liberal inclination.

Anyway, after struggling through with case and rucsac, I had to jog the last 3.5km to the airport, desperate to check in on time. I was of course looking very suspicious and hassled by the time I arrived and all the wires and electrical equipment in my rucsac (minidisc recorder, microphone, etc) aroused suspicion and I was 'busted' by security. After that, 'plane' sailing until news of the storms battering Ireland filtered through and our aircraft made an almost sideways landing at Dublin. Then bumping into Alajandra, (me, not the plane) a post-doc in our team, at the airport where she had coincidentally just come in from a meeting in Geneva added to the surreality of the experience.

Anyway, recuperation, unpacking and then more stories from Online Educa to follow in the coming days.

Prospectus Survey of Irish Higher Education

Sean Flynn from the Irish Times (29.11/07) reports that the Prospectus Survey of Irish Higher Education sample of 175 key figures at third level raises concerns that the absence of a national strategy for the sector is damaging its prospects in the face of increasing global competition.

In a surprise finding, some 60 per cent of those surveyed say the research carried out in Irish institutions is "not yet of a quality that compares well with the world's leading knowledge economies".

Those surveyed as part of the new report from Prospectus Consulting include heads of universities, research centres and Government departments. Some 86 per cent believe an overall national strategy for the sector needs to be developed, without delay.

Iain adds: perhaps not a complete surprise because there is likely to be no coincidence when 82% say there is insufficient money for research and insufficient money for teaching (see Andrew's comment)! In other words, they are saying to the survey team and their funders "if you want us to compete successfully you need to give us more money" !!

Berlin interview 1: International Videoconferencing

The Venus project, to which I referred earlier, aimed to develop practical protocols for the support of international videoconference seminars. They have refined their procedures built on the experience of running 7 site seminars across a number of European countries on topics related to "Global Issues for European Citizens". I spoke to Kamakshi Rajagopal about the project in this interview.

Dissensus in academe

Andrew Keen gave a fine performance in this morning's opening plenary session challenging, quite assertively, the complacent acceptance of everything about Web 2.0 as being positive. Building on the thesis of his recent, controversial, book, "The Cult of the Amateur", he pointed to the dilemma in the perception of Google and Wikipedia as being in some ways 'authoritative' or even correct sources of knowledge and information and the threat that the web poses for children, learners and others who nowawadays use it as the first (and most often, last) port of call. Whilst his plea for a reassertion of 'authority' in the sense of quality, accreditation and validity of information mightn't have gone down terribly well with the post-modernists in the audience (and it didn't), in a later (jam-packed) discussion session he made it quite clear that this cultural relativism, linked with a naive enthusiasm for technology, is at the heart of the google/wikipedia/second life millionaires' financial model; in which, essentially, they reap profits from a free (willing-slave) workforce and in which learners are lied to, mislead and cheated.

He admitted that in his book he was over-generous to 'traditional media', but claimed that his basic point is that, with these, you know their intrinsic biases and act accordingly (eg we all know the political line likely to be followed by any particular newspaper), whereas with the web the cloak of anonymity allows anyone to peddle anything as 'truth'. The difficulty he faced was that his assertiveness and the abrupt way in which he cast aside questions that he had obviously been sick of hearing a million times probably alienated a few of the gentler types in the audience and pushed them onto the defensive opposite position. Indeed, this came through in the final plenary session where Graham Attwell snarled disapproval and proclaimed himself to be a proud ex-hippy and socialist looking to overturn educational traditions with Web 2.0!

Certainly, nothing like a good debate to make a conference memorable!

One of Andrew Keen's targets, in the later discussion, was Second Life, which I have to admit has been somewhat disturbingly cropping up at almost every presentation. Clearly there are many enthusiasts in universities around the world, with many owning 'islands' within SL. Part of what he was saying was a reminder to the audience that the founder of SL comes from a strong evangelical, born-again Christian background as do others within Web 2.0 and virtual worlds and he worries that this ethos is what drives and underpins some of these developments. For example, with SL being an attempt to create a better, Christian world/heaven and to accommodate people to their notion of a separation of body and soul which might ultimately legitimise arguments for the existence of an alternative afterlife/soul. Interesting philosophical point. Of course, one could point out that in practice the sorts of behaviour exhibited by many on SL represent a serious digression from the standard perception of what 'Christian values' are supposedly about.

In summary though, he was at great pains to point out that he is not a Luddite, but rather that we deserve to be more critical of technology developments and their social implications. What we need to deal with urgently is providing children and students with a critical media literacy that allows them to fully appreciate the difference between the opinions of a "fourteen year old" and a "Harvard professor" and stop the delusion that hard work and effort isn't needed in order to be educated or understand subjects. He also suggested that many of the Silicon Valley pioneers have recognised the limitations of their approach and are now developing new systems which restore the value of human expertise, such as the Mahalo search engine which is built on the skills and knowledge of human experts and librarians/curators. The issue of anonymity versus confidentiality is also central to his argument - that anonymity and lack of identity undermines the value of any contribution posted onto the web (eg in wikipedia, discussion forums, etc).

The other talked about keynote in the morning session was that of Prof Sugata Mitra - who later joined Andrew Keen for the discussion session and who presented a very different perspective, based on that of the scientific concept of self-organising systems and how given what we know of evolution and developmental systems, we perhaps shouldn't worry too much about such short-term concepts as SL/Google etc..they may not even survive. Perhaps they are an evolutionary blind alley rather than necessarily the mainstream future of the internet. Indeed, as he rightly pointed out in the long term view, humanity itself will have a tough job continuing as it is!

However, his actual keynote was on an entirely different subject. He described some experiments that he has conducted all over India in which he placed a broadband connected computer into a kiosk (or stone building, usually) with a touch pad and keyboard and left it in the middle of villages or near playgrounds to see what would happen. He showed some video-footage taken in several of the locations and what he discovered was that the devices sparked the curiousity of the children (but not the adults) in these rural or slum areas, and over time the children gradually learned how to use it to surf the web and get information. This is despite the fact that none of them had seen a computer before, had little or no formal education at all and had no knowledge of English. Over a number of months the children had learned English and about computers. He presented a number of fascinating stories and examples including one where he accepted the challege of demonstrating that left to themselves a group of Tamil children in a remote village could teach themselves the basics of biotechnology in English! He said that when he spoke with the children later they said that they hadn't really learned very much, "other than that transcription errors and genetic mutations cause a range of diseases and that the build up of plaque in the brain explains the poor memory and behaviour of some of the older people in the village."

His core message though was that with children, computers should be in the playground and used by groups clustering around, arguing and teaching each other, rather than stuck inside classrooms for individual use.

His presentation was full of humour and clearly endeared him to the audience. Although one person might not be too happy about his wise crack regarding Google's plans to develop a system 'which will be able to tell you what to do tomorrow, what career options suit you and help form your opinions.' He said he already possesses such a system and it can indeed be difficult to cope with but he manages as best he can with his wife !

Oh, and of course he pointed out the irony in the Second Life story being that the word 'avatar' is of course of Sanskrit origin and the Hindu belief in a God only being able to appear in the world in a simulated, animated form, thus in their system it is first life that's second life....if you see what I mean!

Sputnic & Venus

Who comes up with these acronyms? I remember the Dilbert cartoon where the project team meets up and is told that all "the good words" have been used up in previous project titles and the only two acronyms left for them are "phlegm" and "placenta"!!

Seriously, though, the discussions today, as part of the Sputnic forum were interesting. Gilly Salmon kicked things off with some more of her visions of the future of learning and she described her work at Leicester with her "Media Zoo" approach to encouraging academics to play with technologies. As is the norm in this conference, her university also has a presence on Second Life and part of the presentation was a video of an interview with her avatar.

After this, the Venus project presented their experiences of using videoconferencing to host a series of international seminars on the theme of 'Global issues for European Citizens". Issues such as the linguistic challenges and the promotion of discussion in local venues as well as across the 6 or 7 sites were raised. It reminded me very much of the joint videoconferenced lectures project that I was involved in years ago in Scottish universities and some of our other seminar programmes in other projects since. Good to see more people realising the potential of this technology, particularly now that it is well-established, stable and of high quality. The biggest issue in projects such as these is the administrative aspect of booking rooms in other institutions, rather than the technology!!

I spoke with Kamakshi Rajagopal about the project for a forthcoming podcast.

Tomorrow, Online Educa starts in earnest with about 78 parallel sessions! I'll try to get to as many as possible, but it could be tricky!

Berlin update

A busy day today at the Kaleidoscope meeting in which the various project representatives and 'stakeholder' groups met to help formulate a new 'vision statement' for the collaboration's research strategy.

Now the Online Educa event itself is beginning to kick into action and many of the corporate/trade stands are being assembled this evening. Tomorrow marks the pre-conference workshops and I'll be busy at the Sputnic and Venus sessions on videostreaming and videoconferencing in HE.

More news as it happens ....!

BlogTalk 2008

BlogTalk 2008, the fifth international conference on Social Software, is to be held in Cork on 3-4 March 2008. The closing date for proposals is Friday 7th December, 2007. There are three submission categories: Academic, Developer and Practitioner.

John Breslin, from DERI in Galway, is one of the conference chairs and he talks about the conference on his blog.

From the conference website:

The international conference BlogTalk 2008 will bring together different groups of people using and advancing the Internet and its usage: technical and conceptual developers, researchers with interdisciplinary backgrounds, and practitioners alike. It is designed to initiate a dialog between users, developers, researchers and others who share, analyse and enjoy the benefits of social software. The focus is on social software as an expression of a culture that is based on the exchange of information, ideas and knowledge, and moreover we understand social software as a new way of relating people to people and to machines and vice versa. In the spirit of the free exchange of opinions, links and thoughts, we wish to engage a wide range of participants in this discourse.

Co-located with BlogTalk is the Social Network Portability Webcamp, which takes place on the day before the main event.

Willkommen in Berlin! Just arrived

Over here in Berlin for Kaliedoscope-Sputnic-OnlineEduca plus other meetings. A whirlwind of a week in the dark depths of winter. As Christmas markets fill the square, e-learning geeks from across the world swarm towards the Hotel Intercontinental. I'm here myself with a room that overlooks the zoo giving a slightly surreal flavour to the whole experience. Anyway, the minidisc recorder is charging up and the microphone is ready and hopefully I'll manage to grab a couple of interviews for our podcasts. Links will be posted here when available. In the meantime it's Gute Nacht from me!

Echo360 UK and Ireland User Conference

On Monday I attended the first Echo360 (formerly Apreso) user conference at Coventry University. It was a very successful event, with about 40 people who are either using or thinking about using the Echo360 lecture capture system. We have just begun testing our system at NUI Galway and intend to begin a pilot evaluation project in the next few weeks.

For some insight into how the system works, take a look at this short video produced by the Multimedia Team at the Centre for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Mental Health at the University of Birmingham.

I haven't got round to writing up my notes of the event, but in the meantime I came across this blog entry from the London School of Economics, who have been using Apreso for 3 or so years and are currently evaluating a beta version of the much anticipated course caster.

Participants of the Installfest, Galway, 17th Nov 2007

Participants of the Installfest, Galway, 17th Nov 2007
Originally uploaded by CELT NUI Galway

Much is spoken about communities of practice and their importance in enabling us to develop and learn. However, frequently the term is misused and abused to describe groups of individuals who have no real community basis or desire to share knowledge. On the other end of the spectrum, there are genuine communities, such as the Galway Linux User Group (GLUG). Formed after the recent BarCamp meeting earlier this month, the group met again this Saturday morning, patiently showing newbies how to get to grips with various flavours of linux distributions. Armed with their laptops and desktop computers, more than 20 people gathered to test out various installations. I didn't get to meet everyone there, but a huge thanks goes to- Andrew, James, and Ina from Deri and Stephen from Applepie- for their help and organisation, and to the GLUG group as a whole. I'm particularly indebted to Toms who persevered against the odds in configuring my laptop to dual boot, with Ubuntu and Vista! It is mindblowing to see people give so freely of their time and expertise!