Category: Papers & Talks

Various presentations of the group's research coming up in the next few months…

Maybe catch you there!

Related Links:
23 Mar: HCI Centre, City University, London
25 Apr: Computational Thinking Seminar, Univ. Edinburgh
28 Apr: CHI 2007 Workshop on User Centered Design & International Development, San Jose
2-3 May: Compendium Institute Workshop, NASA Ames
4 May: SRI International AI Centre, Menlo Park
8 May: WWW 2007 Workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge
22-27 July: 15th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, Sheffield

Anna De Liddo is a visiting research student from the University of Bari, working with me for 6 months. She's been doing great work in Italy with ISF (Engineers Without Frontiers), using Compendium to prototype a project memory that can help manage the relationships between the multimedia information sources, issues, ideas and arguments from different stakeholder perspectives.

We presented first results from this work in Berlin last week at the DEMO-net Workshop on Argumentation Support Systems for eParticipation:

De Liddo, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2007). Capturing, Mapping and Integrating Argumentation as Project Memory in Participatory Urban Planning. Workshop on Argumentation Support Systems for eParticipation, EU-IST DEMO-net Network of Excellence, March 5, 2007, Berlin [http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/hyperdiscourse/docs/DeLiddo.DEMOnet2007_Paper.pdf]

Related Links:
DEMO-net Workshop on Argumentation Support Systems for eParticipation
Paper and Slides

I recently returned from Long Island, New York, where I joined an invitational workshop at the Dolan DNA Learning Center, to explore “New Horizons in Internet Site Development”. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) where DNALC is based, is a private, non-profit basic research and educational institution. Established more than a century ago, CSHL conducts research programmes in cancer, neuroscience, plant genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics and a broad educational mission, and has been home to four Nobel laureates.

I presented the Hypermedia Discourse research programme, and the OU's OpenLearn LabSpace as input to the workshop's focus on new ways to communicate the latest advances in genetic research via educational e-science portals.

Related Links:
Dolan DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Labs NY
Hypermedia Discourse research programme

UNESCO's International Migration programme studies the impact of migration patterns. One aspect we've all heard about is “Brain Drain” as skilled citizens emigrate. However, you can be in many places at once on the Net, leading to a more positive view, that of “Brain Gain” since many of these diaspora want to continue helping their home countries.

I attended a Diaspora Knowledge Networks workshop in Paris, jointly organised by UNESCO and LIMSI, Univ. Paris, where the concepts of Hypermedia Discourse and the LabSpace e-learning portal connected with the DKN support tools that are now being considered. This has resulted in the LabSpace hosting an experimental DKN site for the Paris team to pilot the use of KMi's collaboration and knowledge mapping tools.

Related Links:
Diaspora Knowledge Networks workshop
DKN LabSpace zone

Today I was in London as an invited speaker on Design Rationale, helping to introduce the “Why?” dimensions of Requirements Engineering. The Institution of Engineering and Technology offered the seminar, entitled “Answering the Six Questions about Requirements”:

“As the applications of requirements is becoming increasingly popular, it is being applied to many aspects of systems engineering such as Management, Finance, Technology and different aspects of work.

This seminar aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners in the field, to give you the latest update of the essential concepts, practices and knowledge you need, to do your requirements better.”

I just got back from a very stimulating week in Nantes at the Semaine de la Connaissance conference, where I spoke about the concept of Hypermedia Discourse, and ran a 2-day Compendium workshop with Al Selvin.

SdC co-located two established national conferences with a bunch of other workshops to promote interdisciplinary coverage and dialogue on knowledge technologies and communities of practice.

Thanks to the SdC conference for their kind invitation and hospitality!

Related Links:
Hypermedia Discourse invited talk and multimedia resourcesCompendium Institute 2006 European workshop

I just got back from the COOP conference in Provence, whose special theme – “seamless integration of artefacts and conversations – enhanced concepts of infrastructure for communication” – matches the work we've been doing in the Memetic Project perfectly (see below)…

COOP is a well established conference specifically seeking to combine theoretical, empirical and technical work on collaboration tools and processes, with the 'harder' research strand of knowledge representation and formal semantics. A fun mix! Thanks to COOP for a great conference!

Memetic: An Infrastructure for Meeting Memory

This paper introduces the Memetic toolkit for recording the normally ephemeral interactions conducted via internet video conferencing, and making these navigable and manipulable in linear and non-linear ways. We introduce two complementary interaction visualizations: argumentation-based concept maps to elucidate the conceptual structure of the discourse using a visual language, and interactive event timelines generated from the meeting metadata. We discuss in detail the affordances of Memetic's tools, in particular the Compendium hypermedia mapping tool, and the Meeting Replay tool that renders the semantic navigation indices into the videoconference replays. Additionally, with respect to methodology and evaluation, we describe how we are engaging diverse end-user communities in the process of designing and deploying these tools.

Buckingham Shum, S., Slack, R., Daw, M., Juby, B., Rowley, A., Bachler, M., Mancini , C., Michaelides, D., Procter, R., De Roure, D., Chown, T., and Hewitt, T. (2006). Memetic: An Infrastructure for Meeting Memory. Proc. 7th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, Carry-le-Rouet, France, 9-12 May. [PrePrint: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/KMI-TR-06-02.pdf]

Related Links:
COOP 2006 paper7th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems

This week La Sorbonne, Universit

KMi is in Utah this week, contributing to the primary international gathering of educators and researchers, debating the future of the Open Content movement.

Open Content is the educational analogy to the Open Source software movement, with the mission to make top quality learning material freely available to any student or educator, in a form that promotes learner engagement, and instructional reuse and adaptation. KMi's Simon Buckingham Shum, accompanied by Richard McCracken (OU Intellectual Property) are participating in discussions around how educational institutions can co-evolve practices and technologies to advance the movement. Simon will be addressing the conference on Thursday, outlining challenges to move “From Open Content Repositories to Open Sensemaking Communities”, describing the potential of KMi's social software (BuddySpace; Hexagon; Flashmeeting) and hypermedia argument mapping tools (Compendium; ScholOnto) to augment open learning resources.

June 2006 update: check out KMi's new Open Sensemaking Communities project to see how this work is now moving forward, funded by the Hewlett Foundation…

Related Links:
Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open EducationOpen Sensemaking Communities news