Top 7 topics at this year's ALT-C

In preparation for the forthcoming ALT-C 2007 conference, I glanced over the content of papers, posters, workshops and symposia on offer. It interested me to see that some key topics have emerged as the front runners for discussion. A quick trawl of titles and keywords revealed these top 7 favourite topics:

e-Learning 31
Web 2.0 Social Software 25
VLEs 24
Blogs 20
Mobile learning 19
Social networking 18
Wikis 16

No surprises really.... There are also a number of other papers dealing with accessibility, e-assessment, student perceptions, and various learning applications use such as VOIP, videoconferencing 3-D virtual worlds, podcasting, mini-games, e-portfolios, and of course ‘learning objects’ (whatever they are…) Even GPS and Interactive Whiteboards have a small presence. I was also interested to note that there are only 6 papers featuring the term ‘distance learning’ (although several more imply it) – but ..... could this be a sign of the decline of this old term? Has distance education now been overhauled in the glittering world of learning technology? We shall see….

ALT! .... I go there

I’m preparing to travel up to the ALT-C 2007 conference next week – it’s the Association for Learning Technology annual bash, held this year in the East Midlands Conference Centre, at the University of Nottingham. I’m editor of the Research Proceedings again this year, so all my hard work has already been put in – now all I have to do is attend, chair a few sessions, and hold a meeting for delegates in which I and my co-editors will discuss what makes a good conference paper (what does? Send your answers in please!). Oh, and there is of course the small issue of driving for 6 hours to get there - easy. The rest of the time I will be dropping in on the papers, demonstrations, workshops and lurking around the exhibitor stalls, trying to pick up new ideas, interesting tips and free pens. I’ll be meeting up again with old colleagues and friends (I am not prepared here to go into the difference), and also talk to some new colleagues and make new friends. I’m particularly interested in listening to the head of Google Research, Dr Peter Norvig, who will be providing the closing keynote address. I intend to blog from the event to keep apace of what is being said and done.

Me old mate Michelle Selinger will also be giving a keynote on the first day, and I have been asked by the Executive Programme Committee to act as her ‘minder’ for the conference – whatever that involves. Once thing anyone who knows Michelle will tell you, is that the last thing she needs is a ‘minder’. She’s quite capable of taking care of herself, but I guess I at least have to offer to play the role I have been given, until she tells me to sling my hook (probably within about 4.5 seconds). I will report back from the conference as time allows, and probably link into all the other ALT-C blogs that will no doubt pop up….

Our cyborg future?

Last Thursday I dragged the family off to see a new interactive exhibition at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle entitled ‘Our Cyborg Future’. It’s on until 27 October, with free entry into the show and it’s well worth a visit if you are in the area. The blurb for the show reads: ‘Where does the me end and the machine begin? This exciting exhibition features body parts, smart textiles, wearable computing and much more. Come and see, come and think, come and discuss: is this the future we want?’

Well, there was plenty to think about, but no-one to discuss my ideas with, as the only people in attendance were the security guards who made sure you didn’t walk off with the exhibits. It would have been nice to talk to a computer scientist or a cybernetics expert, because many of the ideas on show demanded a dialogue of some kind. Perhaps the most significant exhibit for me was the computer-brain interface device, which is worn over the head Petr Cech style, as rubber helmet, replete with EEG sensors that are patched into the computer (pictured). All you do is ‘think’ your cursor around the screen and it follows your every command. Sounds neat and very useful (particularly for quadriplegic users) but also just a little bit scary. It’s not that new an idea either, but it was nice to see it in action, even if only on a video. Bio-clothing was also on show, where fabric changed shape and colour (or even disappeared!) on wearer command. There were numerous computer controlled protheses, some of which appalled my young son, until I told him you didn’t actually have to have your leg amputated to wear a bionic leg – but you could wear one if you were unlucky to lose your leg in an accident.

I also enjoyed getting the remote sensor robot angry – the closer you get to him the more animated he becomes, and I got close enough to get him thrashing around on his pistons like a demented Johnny Rotton. He came within a hair’s breadth of braining me at one point (the robot, not Johnny Rotten).

Oh….and to answer the question in the exhibition blurb – is this the future we want? Well it’s the future we will get, whether we want it or not.

Playing solo

During our family holiday in the North East of England we visited the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, and it was a very pleasant day out. The previously run down quayside area of the river Tyne has had a facelift and the views are stunning, particularly when there is bright sunshine and a clear day, as we enjoyed. Coming out of the Baltic, after a dose of installation art from the likes of Serhiy Bratkov, Graham Dolphin and Vasco Araujo, and a contemporary tribute to the infamous Andy Warhol, I found myself loitering around the quayside waiting for my wife and children who had gone on a short visit up to the Gateshead Sage (pictured). So I perched overlooking the Millennium 'Eye' Bridge, soaked up some of the sun and listened to a couple of buskers who had taken up residence at the edge of the water.

The guy playing the squeeze box was pretty good, but believe me his mate on the trumpet was atrocious. I think he only knew one tune, and there proceeded a tacit battle between the two as the accordianist attempted to change the tune every few minutes. He would be allowed to play his new tune for a while and then the trumpeter would come back in with his same, tired, badly played theme tune, regardless of the chords or tempo. I think most people were getting a little cheesed off with this by the time I left to find my wife and kids. I returned about 30 minutes later and the trumpeter had gone (much to the relief of the families who were strolling around). The accordianist was now free to go through his entire repertoire without hindrance. I think his takings rose exponentially as a result.

In a way, my time online is spent similarly, trying to get out of the same old rut of 'doing the e-mail', visiting the websites I run to see what messages have been left, and then following the same old jaded snail trail of ideas I always seem to follow. Life can be a bit of a tedious experience online and we are all creatures of habit, more or less. Even Second Life is getting a little boring.... There is so much ‘out there’ to see and do, so now, at the start of a new academic year, I am promising myself that I'm going to be a little more adventurous, and pledge to be more of an accordianist and less of a trumpeter.

Cold Turkey?

So I spent (almost) a two week holiday completely OFFline! I admit I suffered the usual withdrawal symptoms though and was tempted on perhaps three or four occasions to go online - the opportunities have been there. You see, I didn’t have internet access in the house I stayed in, but there were several places such as libraries, museums, etc around the region so I could have. I did the same thing last year when we went on holiday to Spain for two weeks – a holiday is a holiday, and I try to avoid anything that resembles work! I admit I do keep my mobile phone with me, but only to take pictures and keep in touch with family.

I heroically resisted the siren's call of the Internet and went cold turkey until the penultimate day of my holiday when I finally succumbed during a visit to Newcastle. I found a computer in a library at the University, logged on and my fears were justified. 268 e-mails were stacked up staring at me, and 197 of them were spam. Blimey. Shouldn’t have bothered. So I had to respond directly to 71 messages when I got home...

Appropriately, I’m reading Distraction by Mark Curtis at the moment. It’s an interesting book, dealing with the pressure we are under today to manage the growing tide of information that continually washes up on our personal shores. Perhaps his most important question in the book is ‘Do we run the risk of believing that data is everything and confusing information with knowledge?’ Curtis believes we have reached the ‘tipping point’ where humankind (at least in the industrialised nations) has no way back in an ‘always connected’ culture. There's an interview with him at this link if you want to know more. The book is not all doom and gloom though, and engages the reader with a number of scenarios in which information and communication technologies can enhance life and create new opportunities for creativity and lively community engagement. He warns though, that the boundaries between public and private spaces are being eroded by digital technologies and we are all being sucked into this vortex. Well, I guess it will be time for me to go cold turkey again in a short while … probably just around Christmas.

Splendid isolation

You know I’m mad keen on visiting places of antiquity, because I have written about it before. Well, here’s another one for you – this is me visiting a medieval site called the 'Hermitage', just down the river from Warkworth Castle, in Northumberland (picture left courtesy of my 13 year old niece Sarah) during what we laughingly call our British 'summer'. The Castle was great and well worth a visit, and as you would expect, the ‘Hermitage’ is quite isolated and can only be reached by a ferry over the river. Apparently, it was the home for many years of a hermit who lived in austere conditions, isolated from the community. It certainly is a bleak and unwelcoming place. I hope he had some kind of heating, ‘cos I reckon in the middle of a Northumberland winter it would be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. Inside there are three small rooms carved out of the living rock -there is a chapel, a long thin (bed)room, and a ledge (open to the elements) that looks out over the woods. There is no fireplace, no electricity, no running water (apart from the river), and certainly no broadband internet connection. There wasn’t even a Welcome doormat. Modern city dwellers would find it very uncomfortable – it felt very lonely and isolated there so I didn’t stick around for long, and I’m sure I wouldn’t want to still be there come nightfall….

Got me thinking about how much we rely on modern technology to make ourselves comfortable. Where would we be without gas cookers, electric light bulbs, flush toilets, washing machines and all the other basic stuff we take for granted? What about the more luxurious stuff like televisions, iPods, mobile telephones, microwaves and home computers? Now we have the uber-luxury technologies – multi-viewer digital cable television, flat screen plasma TVs, global positioning satellite systems, etc etc ad nauseum … you get the idea. Here’s the question – how long before we get so hooked on these new technologies that they become essential for our psychological well-being and comfort? I don’t think I could be a technological hermit – using such items is too deeply ingrained into my personal culture and it would feel like an amputation to give them up. How sad is that? In tomorrow’s next blog I'm continuing this train of thought....

Not so Technocrappi after all....

I'm grateful to Technorati for finally fixing my blog statistics. It has been quite a while and I first blogged about the saga way back in March. My blog reactions (for the uninitiated, those other blogs that think my site is so cool that they cannot resist linking to it from theirs) and my ranking (the Technorati scale you rise up through as more blogs link to yours... it's all rather complicated really) were simply not registering. I went to the blog regularly, but my outpourings were sinking without trace!

I tried everything, sent message after message, and even started to seek out tall buildings... In the end I resorted to a bit of pestering in the right area - directly onto the Technorati help forum itself. After three messages and a great deal of irony (some might called it sarcasm, but what do they know?) I managed to grab the attention of one of the Technorati cogniscenti (does this sound Latin?) to come in and fix my blog.

Hooray! I now have a Technorati authority rating of 11 - that will impress all the traffic cops around my neighbourhood. They wouldn't dare touch me now. "Do you know what speed you were doing sir?" "No, but I have a Technorati rating of 11!" "Oh. Sorry to bother you sir..."

Now I can go on holiday secure in the knowledge that my blog is fully functioning and regular, and has a clean bill of health. Right. Now who do I contact to fix this cold, changeable, crappy British weather? Brrrrrrrrrrrr.

Quintura eats it up

OK, so you've tried Google, and probably keep going back, or maybe you even made your own iGoogle Home page, yep? Me too. You probably also know about tag clouds and how as you use certain key search words, these get larger and those that don't get used shrink? Ever used a swiki? It's a search engine that acts as a wiki space, so that everyone who uses it can add their own knowledge ... and the swiki learns. Swikis have a useful visual element.

Well, I stumbled across Quintura today, and I must say I am quite impressed. It's totally visual. Go check it out for yourself. It presents you with a general tag cloud to begin with. You click on the word or phrase of your choice and it creates a second tag cloud with your key word in the middle. All the other key words associated with it are in its orbit, near to the centre if they are closely associated, more distant if they are less closely associated with it. There are even hyperlinked icons floating about. Hover over the key word and lo and behold, in the right hand column it coughs up all the hits it can find. Excellent. Best search engine I've seen yet. Google may need to revise its front end search system if it wants to match this service. Let me know what you think...

Facebook in the dock

A couple of days ago I reported that YouTube was under fire (see post below). Well, the dock is getting a little crowded, because now I hear that FaceBook is in trouble too. It's been reported on the BBC News that the social networking website has had 6 major British companies withdraw their advertising from its site. These are big spenders including Virgin Media, Halifax Bank and Vodafone. The reason they are taking their trade elsewhere? They don't want to be associated with a Neo-Nazi political organisation (I am not even going to mention their name) that FaceBook has allowed to advertise on the site. It appears that advertisers have no say about who their adverts appear next to, so unless something changes, they won't be back.

It's all a little disturbing I think... I haven't actually seen the offending adverts, but I can guess what they are there for. Recruiting for their cause amongst the majority of young people who subscribe to the site I guess. So here's the question.... should FaceBook do a volte face and (jack)boot out the fascists? Or should we see this little episode as simply Web 2.0 democracy in action? What do you think?

YouTube in the dock

UK teachers have made a call to ban YouTube from British schools. They claim that YouTube makes it easier for bullies to send abusive e-mails and texts to their victims. This relates to a blog I posted about happy slapping in February. You can read the original BBC News article to get more details.

Hmmm... My initial thoughts are that shutting down access to YouTube (or any other web based social networking space) merely shifts bullying activities onto another medium. Try mobile phones, home pc e-mail, the plain old telephone, notes passed in class or simply the 'walk home' from school. The only way to stop bullying is to segregate children in individual plastic bubbles each with their own oxygen supply. Even then there would probably be taunts that some children's plactic bubbles are bigger, uglier or more 'gay' than others.

It's a fact of life, and children will bully each other as a part of the natural learning process of growing up. Don't misunderstand me. Bullying should not be tolerated in any shape or form (I speak as a victim on many occasions, both at school and at work, and it's not funny), but let's not go laying the blame at the door of YouTube. Doing so means you are in danger of sinking to the level of Andrew Keen.