Video – Page 5 – Simon.BuckinghamShum.net

Real-time mapping Election TV Debates

I’ve just Dialogue Mapped the first UK Election TV Debate in Compendium.

The web export went up just after the debate closed…

Hopefully these help to clarify the different contributions made by the three leaders, as well providing a gestalt overview of the most contentious topics (check out all the red challenges links in some topics, such as the economy) and where they were most consensual (check out all the green supports links in the final debate on care for the elderly). A more detailed, reflective analysis would seek to connect claims and assertions to websites with supporting/challenging evidence, other statements made by them, and their manifestos. In addition, we would examine the kinds of arguments made in the text of the nodes, and in the argumentative connections, and possibly explode those into sub-maps, using visual templates of argumentation schemes (see this article on mapping the Iraq debate to how this works).

Note that I started to map from the ITV website’s streaming video, but the connection kept breaking, so I lost contributions, and switched to the TV. But here’s a screenshot showing the opening minutes of the debate, being mapped live, before I switched [zipped QuickTime movie – 10.2Mb].

Comments welcomed. Shall we do this live in the studio next time? 😉

OER Collective Intelligence Widgets: storyboard

As an investigator on the Hewlett Foundation-funded Open Learning Network project (a collaboration between OU and CMU) [olnet.org], my specific interest is to investigate ways to weave a socio-technical infrastructure that will assist the movement in pooling its collective intelligence.

We’re inviting feedback from participants at this week’s OER Conference, and from all members of the OER community, on a design storyboard that goes like this. Working with you, OLnet develops some “widgets” (attractive little apps you can embed in your OER website), which enable us to crowdsource input from the community. These are channelled back to the OLnet website which pools the data, generates aggregate views, offers recommendations of related people and resources to your interests, etc.

OER Collective Intelligence storyboard

With commentary…

Questions for you are therefore…

What do you think of this design storyboard?
What would make these widgets ‘killer apps’ for you?
…so that you’d want to have these on your website, e.g. as an OER educator, learner, publisher, remixer, researcher, funder…? Depending on which hat(s) you wear, you might ask yourself:
What would I like to know about an OER before deciding to use it to learn, or teach with?
What would I like to know about the state of the art in a given debate, before deciding whether to enter it, or fund work on it?

Tell us what you think…

SocialLearn project update

Just posted slides, commentary and webcast on the main SL blog, summarising progress in the SocialLearn project…

SocialLearn update – Mar 18, 2010

View more presentations from SocialLearn, Open U.

Issue mapping for emergency response

The EPSRC-funded Advanced Knowledge Technologies Consortium ran 2000-06. The final demonstrator of all the technologies coming together centred on an emergency response scenario. Our Compendium tool served as the sensemaking hub around an aircraft crash on London, envisioning how a response coordination team might use Compendium overlaid on a GIS, to keep track of events and actions, in concert with a diverse set of AKT semantic web services.

I’ve just got round to converting the concept movie to a podcast [or download hi-res version], so here it is, along with the article that we presented at the ISKRAM conference…

Potter, S.; Kalfoglou, Y.; Alani, H.; Bachler, M.; Buckingham Shum, S.; Carvalho, R.; Chakravarthy, A.; Chalmers, S.; Chapman, S.; Hu, B.; Preece, A.; Shadbolt, N.; Tate, A. and Tuffield, M. (2007). The Application of Advanced Knowledge Technologies for Emergency Response. In: 4th International Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2007), 13-16 May 2007, Delft, The Netherlands. ePrint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/19858

Abstract: Making sense of the current state of an emergency and of the response to it is vital if appropriate decisions are to be made. This task involves the acquisition, interpretation and management of information. In this article and movie, we present an integrated system that applies recent ideas and technologies from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and semantic web research to support sense- and decision-making at the tactical response level, and demonstrate it with reference to a hypothetical large-scale emergency scenario. We offer no end-user evaluation of this system; rather, we intend that it should serve as a visionary demonstration of the potential of these technologies for emergency response.

Cohere movie for Mozilla Jetpack

As you may have seen, in the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge, Mozilla Foundation have teamed up with the MacArthur Foundation “to help turn the open Web into a rich learning environment and explore new possibilities for learning online.”

So, we thought we’d have a crack at it with our Cohere Web 3.0 app for making web annotations, meaningful connections between ideas, and mapping arguments. Here’s the movie that tells the story, and you can get the Mozilla extension for Firefox and Flock from the Cohere homepage.

[Hi-res version]

Well done Anna de Liddo and Michelle Bachler for putting this together in record time 🙂

So far, we’re through Round 1…

Future plans include extending to video annotation (hunting for good examples and open source code to annotate YouTube clips etc), transitioning to a more powerful Flash based visualization toolkit (we’re working with Flare), and providing templates for critical thinking, such as the argumentation schemes we already have for our desktop knowledge mapping tool, Compendium (which currently uploads XML maps to Cohere).

Extending Compendium for choreographic video annotation

We have now added Movie Maps to our Compendium tool. A given idea (i.e. hypertext node) can now be embedded in both time (one or more clips within one or more movies) and space (one or more locations within one or more movies). Because that’s how themes, resonances and meaning manifest.

Movie Maps can be linked into and out of just like any normal Map, so you can use all the usual Compendium strategies for making and managing meaningful connections between ideas:

the appearance/disappearance of a node (of any sort) to highlight something of interest in a clip (including a map containing your analysis)
direct graphical links to make visual connections into/out of/between clips
transclusion (or embedding as we’re now calling it) whereby a node appearing in a clip is embedded in other maps (including of course, other movies)
tags, whereby the clip shares one or more common features with other nodes, within or outside the movie

This has been developed working closely with choreographers who specialise in the use of digital media to play with time and space in dance, in the context of the e-Dance project: I just posted this description in more detail on the e-Dance Project website:

This series of movies brings together Choreography researcher Sita Popat and myself, who demonstrate and discuss the adaptation of one of the project’s e-Science tools for Choreography, the Open University’s Compendium tool for mapping ideas and annotating media. Acknowledgements to Michelle Bachler (Open U.) and Andrew Rowley (U. Manchester) for expert software development, and webcast wizard Ben Hawkridge (Open U.) for helping us migrate the footage to Web. High-resolution versions of the screen recordings are linked to the relevant tracks.

The video-enabled version of Compendium will be going into alpha release this month with invited testers, for full release within a couple of months.

The academic context for this work is set out in a recent article:

Bailey, H., Bachler, M., Buckingham Shum, S., Le Blanc, A., Popat, S., Rowley, A. and Turner, M. (2009). Dancing on the Grid: Using e-Science Tools to Extend Choreographic Research. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 13 July 2009, Vol. 367, No. 1898, pp. 2793-2806. [PDF]

Calculating Mind, Contemplative Mind

There has been an interesting convergence of memes over the past few months. The focal question revolves around the potential role of software tools in helping us move towards a more open, mindful stance when working on problems that require creative insight. We can’t always get there through focused, rational analysis. So what would software do?

Writing as a priest about wisdom, Richard Rohr (e.g. in Everything Belongs) contrasts the difference between the calculating mind and the contemplative mind. Guy Claxton (e.g. in The Wayward Mind) writes about this in similar terms but focused on creativity and learning. Rohr speaks of the spirituality of subtraction, rather than of performance and accretion (see much western religion), and Claxton writes similarly. This is all about learning the habits of mind that can nurture the ability to think deeply and expansively, to see the big picture (to ‘colour outside the lines’ as Rohr nicely puts it), and to allow the unconscious to do its creative work as well, when we allow ourselves to follow hunches and disengage from working consciously on problems.

Then Jack Park sent me a link to this March lecture to Google by David Levy, entitled “No Time To Think”:

Levy kicks off by reminding us of the context in which Vannevar Bush, the father-figure of hypertext, was considering the need for better tools for thinking: how are we going to carve ourselves space to think deeply about the things that matter, when we already experience information overload and disciplinary specialization? (reminder: this is 1945, at the close of WWII!). Levy then introduces a new character (to me) — the German theologian Josef Pieper, who wrote in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, on our profound need for “leisure”, his word for the mental and emotional space to engage and experience the world as it is in all its richness, free of our preconceptions. Another way of speaking about the contemplative stance.

Levy concludes that the next big challenge for human-centred computing may be to rebalance the ancient concepts of ratio (searching, re-searching, abstracting, refining, concluding) with intellectus (thinking, reflection, assimilation, contemplation):

My quest for how these converge into meaningful patterns and a research agenda continues…