Digital classrooms

This is Part 5 in my series of posts on the future of learning and technology. A few years ago Peter John and I wrote a book entitled 'The Digital Classroom'. It was published by Routledge in 2008 and is now also available as a Kindle reader version. It wasn't the first published under that title, and it probably won't be the last. The idea of a 'classroom' (regardless of how anachronistic that may sound) is appealing when it is 'digitised'. It's the old, comfortably familiar territory embellished with the new. Everyone in the world of education it seems, has an interest in how technology is going to influence what we do in the classroom. The book was received well, and we received some positive comments and feedback. Although the book is probably a little dated now, with technology advancing at rapid pace, it still set a benchmark for some of the things we could expect to see in the coming years. We talked for instance about how technology would streamline assessment, and how the curriculum might be impacted by new technologies. There were sections on digital literacies and mobile learning, both of which we considered to be important for the success of education and learning in the future. Blogs and wikis and other social media made an appearance, even though at the time they were still fairly nascent in compulsory education. We even mentioned the Semantic Web (or Web 3.0) as a potential horizon technology for learning. We spent a lot of time talking about digital cameras and interactive whiteboards, both of which have had dubious success in the school classroom.

Ultimately though, we could not have predicted the new tools and technologies that will become very much a part of normal school life in the recent and coming years. We did not foresee the touch tablets and their rapid success in schools, nor did we predict the rapid rise of smart phones and apps, or the potential of augmented reality. The non-touch motion sensing gestural interfaces now emerging (for example the Xbox 360 Kinect) and the voice activation applications were still just a gleam in the eye for many of us. Perhaps we should not have titled the book The Digital Classroom, but simply Digital Classrooms, because now we know that there are many possibilities, and that classrooms that have digital capabilities are many and varied. If I was to take a risk and suggest possibilities for the next 5 years of development, I might be right on some of my predictions, and hopelessly wrong on others, but here we go...

The signs are there that in the coming years, more gestural interface technology will be available for learners, and that advances in manufacture and design will enable the installation of screens on walls, desktop, in fact on any flat surface. The screens will be resilient and high resolution, but as thin as a sheet of card. The mouse, and keyboards such as the one in the image above, may disappear completely in favour of voice and gesture activated tools. For students with mobility issues in particular, this may turn out to be an important leveler. Smart touch devices will continue to develop too, so that every student will have the means to access all their learning resources right there in their hand, wherever they are, and whenever they need them.

Much more learning will be done outside of the classroom. Digital classrooms will become the place where learning is performed, celebrated and assessed - on large wall screens for all to enjoy. For many teachers, learner analytics will become an indispensable tool for tracking student progress and intervening when necessary. Many governments will probably insist on it and legislate accordingly when they realise just how much data can be mined from personal activities across the web. Eye tracking and attention tracking will also emerge as useful behaviour management tools for teachers in the next few years. Gamification and games based learning will establish a stronger foothold in classrooms as teachers realise just how powerful self-paced, self-assessed task oriented and problem based learning can be.

Probably the most important development I foresee though, is the emergence of student developed applications. As technology increasingly takes its hold on the school classroom, so students will become increasingly adept at coding. There is more scope than ever for children to experiment with computers. The Raspberry Pi is just the first of many tools to support this. The result will be the creation of a vast array of student games, mobile apps and eventually new forms of hardware (See this TED talk by 12-year old app developer Thomas Suarez). Many of the new apps and games will be made commercially available. Schools working in partnership with commercial companies will ensure it happens. We may even see some children achieve millionaire status before they leave school, and it will become commonplace for young people to be entrepreneurs before they reach higher education age. Now there's incentive.

A lot of learning comes from doing, making and problem solving. One of the most important contributions technology has made to education over the last decade can be found in its provisionality - that with digital, nothing is necessarily graven in stone, anything can be changed, upgraded, edited, revised, deleted. Learning in digital classrooms will be much more exciting, because learning through failure and experimentation will engage learners thoroughly in the right conditions.

Finally, a word of warning. We don't know how long these developments will take, nor do we know for sure  if they will materialise, because it is very hard to predict the future accurately, and schools are conservative places where change can be very difficult to achieve. What we do know is that the future will be very different from anything we can imagine right now. As ever, your comments and views on this article are very welcome.

Image source


Digital classrooms by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Smart eXtended Web

Will the Web recurse infinitely?

Many of us are obsessed with the future, and are constantly wondering what new technologies, trends or events will change our lives forever. The Horizon Report is one of the most eagerly anticipated reports each year by educators, because it peers down the corridor of time and attempts to predict what we can expect to see in our classrooms in the next year, 2-3 years, 5 years. People spend huge amounts of money each year gambling on the future. The average person bets on horse races or the lottery, whilst the high powered executives buy and sell stocks and shares. Some put their faith in clairvoyants, who for a price will attempt to predict your personal future for you. In the world of learning, we are obsessed with questions about where education is heading next, how work based learning will be enhanced, and more effective methods of engaging learners. Many educators have invested their trust in the use of new and emerging technologies for the future success of learning. Others have been more reticent, preferring instead to rely on the old, tried and tested methods of education and training.

Regardless of personal perspectives, our society is advancing rapidly into a technological future in which just about everything will change. Nothing short of a global disaster will stop it. We have seen the trends. Over the last 20 years, mobile phone texting has taken a significant hold on the communication habits of billions of citizens. New computer interfaces are being introduced that will supplant the ubiquitous keyboard and mouse. Soon we will control our computers using voice and gesture, even facial expressions, mood changes.

We have never been so connected as we are today. Global telecommunications mean that anyone connected can link with anyone else, hear and see them in real time, and send and receive documents at the speed of light. We carry our offices in our pockets. We increasingly do more of our shopping online, and we spend significant proportions of our working days dealing in bits rather than in atoms. We generate enough media content every day to dwarf anything previous societies could create in an entire year.

In the last decade, we have seen the liberation of the microchip from the computer. Now processing power can be embedded into any object, allowing it to be connected to the global network. This is significant, because it heralds a new kind of network made not only of knowledge and people, but a network of smart objects, an Internet of Things. Not only will our personal possessions become connected and smarter, so will our homes, our classrooms, our communities, and ultimately our cities. Yet these rapid technological changes could also be our Achilles heel. We are now so reliant on our computing power and telecommunication capability that if it were suddenly removed or disrupted, much of our familiar world would grind slowly to a halt.

The Web has changed, evolving through a number of iterations, to become increasingly prescient not only about what we wish to search for, but also the context within which it is being searched. Semantic search also takes our previous behaviour into account. Now the Web is about to get even smarter. Where Web 1.0 was about connecting content, and Web 2.0 (the social web) was about connecting people, Web 3.0 (the semantic web) will be about connecting collective intelligence. It will be the global network of distributed cognition. But just what will this emerging hive mind look like and what will we be able to do with it?

I wrote about Web 3.0 in an earlier post and speculated that the 'Smart eXtended Web' would be characterised by a number of features that included intelligent collaborative filtering of content, 3D visualisation and interaction and extended smart mobile interfaces. Now several new developments will bring these ideals to fruition, and it will happen sooner than we expected, because change is not linear, it's exponential.

Paul Groth talks about Web 3.0 in terms of what it will be able to do for us. In his paper The Rise of the Verb he explains his vision of how the web will evolve beyond the representation of knowledge in static data sets to the point where it can turn our commands into actions. Already, he writes, we can say to Siri: 'Move my meeting from 3 to 4'. In the future we will be able to say to Siri: 'Mow the lawn' and it will be done. The difference, he suggests, is that at present we can command our tools to action in the virtual world, but in the near future, with the advance of the Internet of Things and an emerging capability of the Web to interpret verbs as calls for action, we will be able to command operations in the real world too. He argues that in the next ten years we will see a web that is not only grounded in mathematical functions and definitions, but one that is also able to operate through the smart objects around, providing us with uses in the real world too. Ten years? I think it will be sooner.

In the next blog post: Sentiment tracking

Image source Fotopedia


The Smart eXtended Web by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Interview with a Wolfram

Conrad Wolfram is a man dripping with ideas and innovation. He is also a decent, unassuming and thoroughly pleasant guy. He has a high powered vision of the world 'where computation meets knowledge.' Since May 2009, when it was released for general use, Wolfram Alpha has caused some waves. For the Wolfram brothers Stephen and Conrad, Alpha is less a search engine, more an answer engine, because it processes queries against structured data rather than simply presenting a list of pages or hyperlinks found through word-matching.

I had the pleasure to hear Conrad Wolfram give a keynote speech on semantic search at LearnTEC recently, and I was even more delighted when I got to sit with him on the train all the way back to the airport, and the opportunity to converse with him about semantic web, computation research, intelligent search and the nature of knowledge. A graduate of Cambridge University and now Strategic Director of Wolfram Research, Conrad has some marked ideas about technology and learning. He is also good friends with a number of luminaries in the world of computing including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. He drops their names into the conversation as if they are sitting across the room from us. Software engineer Theodore Gray is mentioned in the conversation, and we discuss how Wolfram research is developing. Conrad also tells me how he felt just before walking on stage to present his TED talk. We talk about how Wolfram's earlier intelligent knowledge engine Mathematica was founded. We talk about the future of knowledge, we touch on David McCandless' and Hans Rosling's amazing data visualisation tools, and we discuss the need for better understanding of how to use search terms. Time went by quickly and we parted company at Frankfurt Airport, promising to stay in touch. As I made my way over to the check in counters, my mind went back to his speech earlier in the day...

During his LearnTEC keynote, Conrad Wolfram (pictured left with conference chair Peter Henning and I) had given a live demonstration of both the Wolfram Alpha answer engine itself and also a new experimental site which 'I'm not supposed to show you just yet.' It is impressive stuff, with powerful computation that goes beyond simple interpretation of the words entered, generates 3 dimensional visualisation of data and promises the capability to automatically create widgets when the user asks the right questions. How old was Queen Victoria in 1890? It will give you the answer and then create a widget to deal with other, similar queries. Where is Victoria Falls? It provides a location map, and offers a number of geolocation options. The four pillars of WA, said Conrad Wolfram, were linguistic analysis, curated data, dynamic computation and computed presentation. If used correctly and intelligently, WA is indeed an extremely powerful research and computational tool.

Conrad Wolfram also had a lot to say about learning during his presentation. He argued that the value chain of knowledge is changing. By this he suggested that knowledge brokering is no longer the domain of the experts, but echoing sentiments of the wisdom of crowds and the power of tribes, he argued that repositories of knowledge can become even more powerful if they are searched intelligently and using visualisation computation. And as each new node and connection is created by individuals, a new democratisation of knowledge emerges - that is Wolfram's vision. 'If you drive yourself,' he said, 'you learn more about the route than you would if you are a passenger.' This suggests that most search engines make the enquirer a mere passenger in the journey to knowledge, whilst WA puts the enquirer firmly in the driving seat.

And what about education and Wolfram Alpha? He has a message for teachers: 'Stop teaching calculating', he advises, 'and start teaching maths.' The tools are already available for students to do calculation, what they now need, he states, is the ability to test things and verify results. The knowledge balance in schools, said Wolfram, is all wrong at present. There is too much knowledge giving and not enough opportunity for students to test things, experiment and discover for themselves.

Images by Gudrun Porath

Interview with a Wolfram by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Semantic technologies and learning

The January special issue of Interactive Learning Environments is out right now. Our guest editors have done a great job drawing together 5 excellent papers under the banner of 'Semantic Technologies for Multimedia Enhanced Learning Environments' and for Learning with 'e's readers, here is the editorial in full, with excellent summaries of all the papers by our special issue editors Marco Bertini, Vladan Devedzic, Dragan Gasevic and Carlo Torniai:

Widely available learning material is recognized as a key asset that enables aggregation, provisioning, retrieval, reusability, adaptation, and personalization of educational content. Besides being able to author, publish, discover, and use high-quality learning objects, it is equally important to use multimedia-rich learning objects. Many domains require very advanced content, where different concepts and processes require the use of multimedia (e.g. image, sound, and video) to provide students with a better understanding of concepts under study. This inevitably sets new requirements in multimedia-enhanced learning environments for the advanced representation and creation of learning metadata. The goal is not only to have a richer representation of learning content but it is also important to consider multimedia learning objects in various learning situations where interaction and collaboration are required features. For example, interaction needs to be improved across all the six dimensions of the well-known interactivity triangle with the three main participating nodes of interaction - instructors, students, and content (Anderson & Garrison, 1998). Yet, students are also content creators. This is nicely facilitated by Social Web technologies (e.g. blogs and wikis), which better enable learning environments to support principles of social constructivism. While today user-created multimedia content is a commodity in learning environments, we need to have pedagogical strategies to show how to make the best use of the available technologies. Creative solutions are needed and new perspectives are more than welcome. Just as we can expect learners to easily create and publish multimedia content, we should also facilitate interaction between learners, their peers and educators through multimodal channels of communication and help new users benefit from the experience of previous users of multimedia learning content. Spector (2009) of Google Inc. refers to this phenomenon as “fluidity among the modalities,” where many new modalities will come in addition to the more frequently used ones - text, video, voice, and image.

Scope of the special issue

This special issue analyzes how semantic technologies can be leveraged to address some of the above-mentioned challenges of multimedia-rich learning environments. To perform this analysis, it is first important to define the concept of semantic technologies. Traditionally, the Semantic Web is associated with semantic technologies (Gaevi, Jovanovi, & Devedi, 2007). Ontologies, as the backbone of the Semantic Web defining formally and explicitly represented shared domain conceptualization, are the main way for representing and sharing metadata. Current research in learning technologies has shown that in learning environments Semantic Web technologies can integrate data about learning objects, learning activities and learners captured from various e-Learning systems and tools. Due to the intensive use of Web 2.0 techniques (e.g. collaborative tagging, social networking, mash-ups, and wikis), lightweight representation of semantics and metadata is used in the form of folksonomies, user comments, and ratings. Despite the initial perception that Web 2.0 opposes the Semantic Web, these two efforts are being jointly used to create a common space of semantic technologies (Hendler, 2009). Therefore, semantically enhanced metadata for learning multimedia cannot be considered without the social and interaction context, in which learning constantly happens (Jovanovi, Gaevi, Torniai, Bateman, & Hatala, 2009). Metadata is used to facilitate the discovery and sharing of learning multimedia objects and metadata created through the interaction of learners and educators among themselves and with the learning content.

This special issue solicited papers focused on the use of semantic technologies in multimedia-enhanced learning environments. In this call, we were especially interested in publishing research reports and lessons learned in the following research tasks:

• Ontologies and semantic annotations for multimedia learning objects.


• Collaborative tagging and folksonomies for multimedia learning objects.


• Semantic social networking in multimedia-based learning environments.


• Semantic technologies for enabling pedagogical theories in multimedia-enhanced learning environments.


• Semantic-enhanced learning designs in multimedia-enhanced learning.


• Semantic technologies for personalization and adaptation of multimedia-enhanced learning.


• Semantic-rich service-oriented architectures for multimedia learning environments.


• Semantic multimedia content for (collaborative) mobile learning.

Selected papers

After an enthusiastic response to the open call for papers, followed by a rigorous peer-review process, we are pleased to present five papers addressing some of the indentified research topics. While it would be unrealistic to expect a complete coverage of all research topics due to their vast scope, the paper selection reflects thoroughly the state-of-the-art in this area and some promising research results. More importantly, we can also see many needs for future research, which will hopefully be addressed in the years to come.

In the paper entitled “Automatic generation of tests from domain and multimedia ontologies,” Andreas Papasalouros, Konstantinos Kotis and Konstantinos Kanaris look at the problem of automated generation of quizzes for assessment from domain knowledge. The authors recognized that currently there are many approaches allowing for generating and analyzing tests, but they all rely on text-based content. However, in many different areas, it is important to include multimedia content into the questions asked in quizzes. In their approach, the authors make use of ontologies to represent knowledge of a domain at hand. The domain ontologies are then used together with multimedia annotation ontologies to annotate multimedia learning objects. On top of such annotated multimedia, the authors propose several different strategies for generation of multiple choice questions, where the assessment of students' answers is making use of ontology-based reasoning (i.e. subsumption). Besides applications on text-based content, the authors also demonstrate how their approach can be used for images and argue that the approach can easily be applied to other types of multimedia content. With the use of a prototypical implementation of the proposed approach, the results obtained in the evaluation demonstrate some very promising practical prospects.

Semantic annotation of multimedia learning objects is the topic addressed in the paper entitled “Semantic annotation of video fragments as learning objects: a case study with YouTube videos and the Gene Ontology” by Elena Garca-Barriocanal, Miguel-Angel Sicilia, Salvador Sanchez-Alonso and Miltiadis Lytras. The authors focus their effort on user-generated content (in particular videos posted on YouTube) that can be used as learning material. The need for effective ways to annotate this content is addressed by an annotation tool based on domain ontologies. The generated metadata are then used as a filter for selecting relevant parts of annotated clips as learning objects.

Another paper also focuses on collaborative annotation of multimedia learning content - “A collaborative multimedia annotation tool for enhancing knowledge sharing in CSCL,” by Stephen J.H. Yang, Jia Zhang, Addison Y.S. Su and Jeffrey J.P. Tsai. The authors investigate various annotation techniques (e.g. comments or tags) as instruments helping students develop their critical thinking skills through collaborative learning. In particular, they proposed an architecture based on the use of semantic technologies (for conceptual modelling of collaborative annotations) and web services (for distributed collection and flexible integration of shared annotations). By developing a novel learning environment for collaborative e-Learning and knowledge sharing, using a personalized annotation management system (PAMS 2.0), the authors extensively evaluated the implications of their architecture and approach in a course involving 94 junior university students. The analysis of the collected data indicates that the proposed approach to knowledge sharing helps learners better comprehend their readings and stimulate them ask engaging questions to be discussed with their peers.

The role that semantic technologies can play in reusing and sharing learning resources is well depicted by A. Yessad, C. Faron Zucker, R. Dieng-Kuntz and M.T. Laskri. In their paper entitled “Ontology-based semantic relatedness for detecting the relevance of learning resources,” they describe a novel approach to the computation of the semantic relevance of learning resources to a learning context of a learner. The idea is to compute the relevance between conceptual annotations for the learning resource (built using its role in the learning process and its learning topics) and the concept of interest to the learner. The proposed method offers promising results compared to both semantic measure of similarity and experts ratings.

While it is important to discover some parts of multimedia content, it is also equally important to validate the quality and relevance of the learning content to be used by a learner. In the paper “Constraint modeling for curriculum planning and validation,” Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Ingo Brunkhorst, Nicola Henze, Elisa Marengo and Viviana Patti recognize in authoring of personalized curricula, a gap between learners' traits (e.g. background knowledge or various cognitive traits) and curricula that educational institutions may offer. To address this research challenge, the authors propose a constraint-based technique based on the use of ontologies, model checking principles, and temporal logic to validate whether personal curricula being proposed for each individual learner satisfy the learner's personal traits. The prototypical implementation of the Personal Reader system for education allowed the authors to evaluate their proposed method and to report on some important lessons learned.

Image source by Taylor & Francis

Heating the house or burning it down?

My public keynote yesterday in the trade fair arena at the LearnTEC Trade Fair and Conference in Karlsruhe, Germany was quite an experience. I wore a microphone headset which made me feel like an astronaut (but alas none could be found, despite the close proximity to Darmstadt European Space Agency Centre). The headset didn't make me look like Michael McIntyre, but it certainly gave me a lot of freedom to move around the audience and interact dynamically with them, and with over 300 people crowding in from all parts of the arena, we had an interesting and fast moving session. I presented a talk entitled: The future of learning: Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and the eXtended Web (Slideset here) which seemed to capture the mood of the conference. They like talking about the future here at LearnTEC, even if it is uncertain (the future, not LearnTEC - which seems to be growing from strength to strength, already in its 19th year, with 6000 exhibition visitors and 1200 conference delegates over the three day event).

I talked about how the Web, in all its incarnations, is changing the way learning can be conducted, and discussed the impact of mobile technologies. We touched on a number of new and emergent technologies including augmented reality (AR) and non-touch, natural gesture interfaces such as the XBox 360 Kinect and MIT's Sixth Sense wearable. At the end there was at least 15 minutes of questions and discussions, and I could tell from the questions that everyone seemed to be thinking deeply about what was being said. It was an ideal environment for this presentation, as hopefully the pictures above will show. To be deep in the heart of exhibitor land, and with many of the exhibitors leaving their stands to participate, just has to be a way forward in the context of the debate on the divide between vendor and practitioner (see the comments on my previous post for the discussion thread).

One of the comments from conference convenor Prof Peter Henning was that the discovery of fire was a game changer. I added in my response that perhaps it was not the discovery of fire that was so important, but the discovery of the ability to make fire. We discussed the disruptive innovation of the Gutenberg Press (invented so close to Karlsruhe, in Heidelberg) and its role ín democratising knowledge. Previous to movable type setting, publishing was extremely limited, but with the introduction of mass affordable publishing came the need to develop the entire population's literacy skills. My message to the audience was that with the introduction of social media and semantic web technologies, a new disruption is now occuring - and we now need new literacies - digital literacies for the entire population. We also discussed how to harness the excitement and richness of informal learning within formalised contexts, and how the future of learning will rely for its success on preparing young people not to learn facts (which are often outdated by the time students graduate) but to instill within them all the ability to learn how to learn, solve problems and adapt quickly to changing situations. The final message for the audience was that just as with fire, web tools have the capability to be used skillfully, or badly, and without care. We can either heat the home, or we can burn the house down.

Image source by Gudrun Porath


Heating the house or burning it down? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

eXtending the Web

eXtending the Web - New and Emerging Learning Technologies

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

I was up at stupid o'clock yesterday to present a webinar for the ASCILITE organisation - the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education. The time zone differences meant that my audience, distributed across Australasia, was listening to me in the evening, while I was sat in my office in jeans and a T-shirt at 7 in the morning, armed with copious quantities of caffeine and a box of matchsticks. While I talked, as if by magic, the sun removed itself from Australia and New Zealand and reappeared outside my window. I was actually up an hour earlier at 6 am finalising and uploading my slides onto ASCILITE's Wimba platform, and then making sure the technical details were all in order. But I enjoyed it. The audience were very knowledgeable, and asked some pertinent questions.

My subject was "The eXtended Web - New and Emerging Learning Technologies" - it was essentially a gaze into the future of e-learning where smart mobile technologies create a ubiquitous learning context, and where semantic software predicts your needs even before you ask the computer. It's not too hard to envisage this, including 3D manipulation of virtual objects and natural gesture driven learning, and of course the use of augmented reality for learning and context awareness while on the move. The technology is already here, in both handheld and wearable versions - as I try to depict in my slides above - but it may take some time before everyone who wants access to them can have it. We shall see - it's hazardous predicting the future, especially where technology is concerned, but we can watch the trends and see where the road is leading. We live in exciting and challenging times, and we can expect to see a lot of changes taking place in the next few years in the world of education.


eXtending the Web by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Web 3.0 Social Network

I couldn't resist re-posting this article which first appeared exactly a year ago, on April 1st 2009. I hope you enjoy it... :-)

For many people the Social Web is simply far too complex to organise. Many of us have unwanted or unused Facebook, Myspace, Flickr or Bebo accounts 'out there' that we haven't visited or done anything with for a very long time. These stagnant accounts clog up the Web and use up valuable memory on someone's server somewhere. Messages, pokes and invitations for vampire food fights wait forlornly for an answer. Some complain that they find it difficult to follow Twitter, update their LinkedIn site and carry on blogging, because there is just not enough time in the day. Some people are completely confused over the whole Web 2.0 thing and simply don't get it. They fail to make optimum use of their social network because they don't know enough about its potential. Well, all that is about to change with help from the Semantic Web.

Software company Avinuon have just announced a new Web 3.0 tool that will give you more time by doing your social networking for you. Plonkr will not only organise all your web tools and services in one place, it will also regularly update dormant sites on your behalf using the latest, state-of-the-art intelligent agent software, even without being asked. Plonkr is 'intelligent' enough to send responses back to your network buddies in a manner that perfectly emulates your own style. Are you drinking in the pub when you should be working? Use Plonkr, and your boss will think you are still hard at work in the office. Using recurrence plotting and fuzzy measure analysis the software will be able to predict what you want to say even before you say it, or in some cases, according to its critics, whether you really want to say it or not. One critic of the new service, Dr Frank Lee, of the Paliamentary watchdog FIDO (the Federated Independent Digital Observatory), believes Plonkr may be a step too far. 'Call me a luddite if you like', he said, 'but do we really want machines doing our thinking for us? Here in Parliament we are quite capable of making our own mistakes without the aid of computers, thank you very much'.

Kurt Prilalofo, CEO of Avinuon, is clearly more positive about his new service. 'We are looking at the future of Web 3.0 social networking, right here, right now. This is a seamless, costless service that is at once both seamless and costless', he said. Prilalofo's new intelligent agent software algorithms are expected to break the mould of previously available systems, enabling people to 'literally be in more that one place at the same time' he said. Whilst this is neither here nor there, Plonkr seems like a great idea, and may well be the beginning of something truly monumental.

Interactive Learning Environments

The current special issue of the journal Interactive Learning Environments focuses on 'Social Networks Research', and here's a heads up for the next issue, due out in December, which has just gone to press. For those interested in Web 2.0 tools and technologies for learning, there will be a feast of articles in the special issue entitled 'Web 2.0 for Interactive e-Learning', which has been edited by Yueh-Min Huang, Stephen J.H. Yang and Chin-Chung Tsai. The table of contents is below, giving you a glimpse of what you can expect:

Culture, learning styles, and Web 2.0 by Bolanle A. Olaniran

The Social Semantic Web in Intelligent Learning Environments: state of the art and future challenges by Jelena Jovanovic, Dragan Gasevic, Carlo Torniai, Scott Bateman and Marek Hatala

An innovative approach for promoting information exchanges and sharing in a Web 2.0-based learning environment by Hui-Chun Chu, Gwo-Jen Hwang, Chin-Chung Tsai and Nian-Shing Chen

Using blogs as a professional development tool for teachers: analysis of interaction behavioral patterns by Huei-Tse Hou, Kuo-En Chang and Yao-Ting Sung

Self-arrangement of fleeting student pairs: a Web 2.0 approach for peer tutoring by Wim Westera, Gijs deBakker and Leo Wagemans

Finding trustworthy experts to help problem solving on the programming learning forum by Shian-Shyong Tseng and Jui-Feng Weng

Collaborative learning utilizing a domain-based shared data repository to enhance learning outcomes by David Lubliner, George Widmeyer and Fadi P. Deek

Location matters: leveraging knowledge building with mobile devices and Web 2.0 technology by Hyo-Jeong So, Peter Seow and Chee Kit Looi

Image source

Rethinking Web 3.0 and Connectivism

Today Florence Meichel @fmeichel sent me a link to her post Qu'est-ce que la cognition - points de repères en sciences cognitives - which is translated from the French as: What Cognition? Benchmarks in the Cognitive Sciences. This resulted from a short exhange we had earlier today on Twitter about the nature of thinking and learning within a Web 3.0 or 'semantic based' web. My earlier post on e-Learning 3.0 also came up in the conversation and Florence argued that George Siemen's Connectivist approach to learning in a digital age might actually be superceded by our need to reconceptualise the whole idea of what learning will mean - especially when we are immersed in a world of ambient mobile pervasive communication where intelligent agents and filtering tools do our bidding for us. 'Connectionism is so Web 2.0' - was her argument in essence. To underline her point Florence shows that connectivism represents thinking differently to other theories of cognition, and that a new theory of cognition will be required to explain how we represent knowledge in a semantic web.

Well, here for English speakers is her post. Hopefully I have translated it into English without losing too much of the nuance or power of Florence's ideas:

I share here with you some useful benchmarks to help include/understand different cognitive approaches.

For a cognitivist, cognition is the handling of symbols which start from primitive rules. This is the principle upon which computers still function (but this is changing!). One example: a computer handles the colours red and white to form a pink square - the symbol and rule of the square are previously imposed.

For a connectionist, cognition is the emergence of total states in a network of simple components. Here simple components remain primitive. An example: On a table you can place different coloured mosaic squares and people will together create a collective work which was not previously agreed upon. This experiment is that of the poetic generator which I previously spoke about.

For an “enactivist”, cognition is the action of production - that which through the process of the interaction to cause the emergence of permanent co-constructions. One example: The colour red is a collective agreement which has emerged progressively over time through multiple interactions around perceptions. This representation is not imposed but rather, constructed. We can thus deconstruct and rebuild concepts in a creative way through human interaction.

In my opinion, what we learn in acts within social networks are dimensions of the connectionist and enactivist theories described here.

Image source

On the Horizon

The 2009 Horizon Report, the annual report on the state of play of learning technology, predicts that there will be three key horizons of important development in the near future. In the executive summary the report authors suggest there are six technology groups we should watch:

In the first adoption horizon we find mobiles and cloud computing, both of which are already well established on many campuses — and still more organizations have plans in place to make use of these technologies in the coming months. Institutions at the leading edge of technology adoption are also already applying the two clusters of technologies we have placed on the mid-term horizon, geo-everything and the personal web. All four topics on the first two horizons are already in common use in other sectors, including entertainment, commerce, and the world of work. The two technologies placed on the far-term horizon, semantic-aware applications and smart objects, are not yet commonly found in an educational context, although research is being conducted in both areas and the rate of development seems to indicate that these topics are well worth watching.


This is much in keeping with the views of many leading experts in the fields of e-learning and m-learning, so it comes as no surprise. I even suggested something very similar in my recent blog post entitled e-Learning 3.0. What is important though, is that we appear to be moving more quickly toward the use of personal web type learning environments, where the use of mobile, handheld and semantically enabled 'smart' technologies will play an increasingly important role in all sectors of education. We will now wait to see 'when', not 'if', these applications become mainstream in education.


Johnson, L., Levine, A., & Smith, R. (2009). The 2009 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.


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e-Learning 3.0

I'm excited by the future. It's something I have always looked forward to! But what will e-learning look like in a few years time? When Stephen Downes laid down his manifesto for e-Learning 2.0 in 2005, he tapped into the zeitgeist of emerging social technologies and theorised a number of possibilities. Four years on technology is moving ever more rapidly, and a reappraisal of learning within digital spaces is overdue.


In conversation earlier today on Twitter with Sue Waters and Darcy Moore, we discussed what learning would look like in a Web 3.0 world, and how it might differ from current learning. This led me to revisit some thinking I have been doing recently about what for the sake of convenience I will call 'e-Learning 3.0'. I will try to encapsulate some of these thoughts here, attempt some (hopefully not too dangerous) predictions, and hopefully promote some discussion. I believe that e-Learning 3.0 will have at least four key drivers:

1. Distributed computing


2. Extended smart mobile technology


3. Collaborative intelligent filtering


4. 3D visualisation and interaction
   

Firstly, in a Web 3.0 world we will not only tap into the semantic web with all it promises, but e-Learning 3.0 will transgress the boundaries of traditional institutions, and there will be an increase in self-organised learning. Why? Because we will gain easier access to the tools and services that enable us to personalise our learning, and these will be aggregated more easily too. Additionally, with new cloud computing and increased reliability of data storage and retrieval, the mashup is a viable replacement for the portal which will lead to less reliance on centralised provision. This in turn may hasten the death of the ailing institutional VLE.

Secondly, many commentators such as Derek Baird believe that Learning 3.0 is all about mobile technologies. Mobiles will play a big part in the story of e-Learning 3.0. There will need to be ubiquitous access to tools, services and learning resources, including people - peer learning group, subject specialists and expert support. With smart phone devices and better connectivity through constantly improving line-of-sight (satellite and wireless) networking services, there is little to stop learners everywhere from accessing what they need on the move, from virtually anywhere on the planet. Digital divides of the future will not focus on 'have and have not' socio-economic divides, but will more likely be 'will and will not' psychological divides, and 'can and cannot' skills divides.

Thirdly, truly collaborative learning will be possible in all contexts. Through predictive filtering and massively multi-user participative features, e-Learning 3.0 will make collaborating across distance much easier. With the best will in the world, very little collaborative learning occurs through the use of wikis and blogs, whilst social networks generally connect people but often superficially, and can also isolate. In a recent post entitled Is Twitter the semantic web?, I speculated on Twitter's functionality and suggested that through its primitive filtering tools such as RT, DM, @ and #tagging, we are witnessing some of the early semantic features that enable users to work smarter and more collaboratively. Intelligent agents will take this a lot farther.

Finally, 3D visualisation will become more readily available. Quicker processing speeds and higher screen resolutions will provide opportunities for smoother avatar-driven 3D interaction. Multi-gesture devices which will operate in 3D space will also become more widely available, reminiscent of the opening scenes of the science fiction film Minority Report. Touch surface interfaces are already here (I have one on my laptop) and multi-touch versions too (my iPhone has one) which will ultimately signal the demise of the mouse and keyboard. See David Beers blog for more on these ideas. 3D multi-touch interfaces will make a whole range of tasks easier including file management, fine motor-skill interaction, exploration of virtual spaces and manipulation of virtual objects.

If Web 1.0 was the 'Write Web' and Web 2.0 is the 'Read/Write Web', then Web 3.0 will be the 'Read/Write/Collaborate Web'. But it will not only promote learning that is more richly collaborative, it will also enable learners to come closer to 'anytime anyplace' learning and will provide intelligent solutions to web searching, document management and organisation of content.

These are my thoughts on what I think e-Learning 3.0 will look like. Some may think I am barking up the wrong tree, and others may think I'm simply barking. Inevitably some will disagree with some of what I think, whilst others may point out some glaring omissions. Fine - this is just my first stab at this. Let's discuss and see what we can come up with to extend and/or perfect this wish list - collaboratively.





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Is Twitter the Semantic Web?

Saw a blog post from Alan Cann over at the University of Leicester this evening which got me thinking. His post was entitled 'Twitter drives traffic to blogs and social networks', and in it he claims that Twitter is the semantic web. He has a great poem on his site called 'The Semantic Web will not be Televised' which expresses this idea perfectly.

Although the Semantic Web (Web 3.0?) is still somewhat ill-defined and there are disagreements over exactly what it is, or what it looks like, most people agree that elements of it at least, have been with us for some time. The key presumed attributes of the semantic web are its psuedo-intelligent predictive and filtering capabilities:

Back in 1999 Sir Tim Berners-Lee declared: "I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers."

This is a grand architectural design of course, most of which is not completely accessible to the average computer user. What we do understand however, is that 'intelligent agents' in software will enable computers to filter out what we don't want and push to us what we do want, based on our previous use of search engines, network transactions, etc.

In this context, Alan Cann is probably correct because Twitter can act as a network filter - still under the control of the user, with little intelligence built into it other than the choices of the user - but never-the-less possessing a form of filtering capability beyond that of the average user. We are still some way off from truly intelligent agents that predict accurately what you want, when you want it, delivered to your current location. But Twitter is much more than the glorified e-mail system many claim it to be. Twitter is certainly a huge step toward semantic predictive filtering - it allows you to lock directly into and maintain your own personalised community of interest, where you can follow or un-follow who you wish, communicate across boundaries and push/pull information as you require it. It employes a number of simple and abbreviated filtering features such as #hashtagging, @names, RT (Retweeting) and DM (Direct messaging) which many social networking tools do not have. It is only a small step from here to automated versions.





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Devon cream tea (calorie free)

Here are some more reflections on the Plymouth e-Learning conference.... Besides a large contingent of Plymouth bods, it was great to see people at the conference from Edinburgh, Salford, Chichester, Norwich, Swansea, Coventry, Leicester, Bournemouth, Staffordshire, Exeter, Gloucester, Cumbria, Portsmouth and DeMontfort Universities (and I have probably forgotten several others). The presenters were professional and polished in their delivery, and the audience was smart and tech-savvy, asking some pertinent and searching questions. Throughout the day, our learning technologists and other volunteer helpers slaved to keep the event on track, running around fixing technical issues before they became disasters, folding and stuffing (delegate folders mind), answering questions, running errands and generally making themselves useful.

The catering was also pretty darn good. Lunch was excellent. I have to own up - On a whim I organised an afternoon Devon cream tea for 80. I have a confession to make. I informed the conference in my opening speech that at the University of Plymouth clotted cream and scones was calorie free. I lied. It's packed full of wicked, naughty things, but I don't care (and neither did the delegates, many of whom wandered around oblivious with cream all over their faces). Mark Stiles lamented: (and I quote) 'it's impossible to eat this with a beard!' Another delegate was overheard saying: 'you wouldn't get this at my university!' Cream tea aside, it was a very successful day, with plenty of useful dialogue around usability issues, access, interoperability, intellectual property, copyright, sustainability, social interaction, professional mentoring, semantic web applications, ethics, innovation, policy, widening participation, and of course most importantly ... learning.

We are going to do it all again next year on 23-24 April. It will be bigger and better. We will have a social event, and two keynote speakers. A larger programme with plenty of interactive demonstrations. A book is planned (this year's 2008 event has already been spoken for - the best papers will go into an edited volume entitled: 'Digital Learning, Repurposing Education'. The editorial board is being chosen as you read this. Oh ... and we will have Devon Cream Tea again. I promise.