Tag: hyperdiscourse

“The Future of Text” hits the streets

Congratulations to Frode Heglund, convenor for 9 years of the widely respected Future of Text Symposium, who has just edited and published The Future of Text book! The book is “a letter to the distant future”, in which an astonishingly diverse group of people share perspectives on where humanity has got to with the symbol systems we use to codify and share ideas — “Text” — and where we might be going. I was honoured to be invited to contribute to this: The Future of Text in Three Moves.

From the book’s introduction:

“I have invited some truly phenomenal people to contribute to this work, and against all odds, they said yes. There are eminent representatives from the worlds of art, typography, science, software development, academia and more. Text writes our history, and text guides our future, but text itself is not often reflected on, let alone written about.”

You can replay videos from the launch event, which was introduced by no less than Vint Cerf who has supported this work from its early days:

Well it’s been a hell of a year, so here’s a book to settle down with over Christmas and New Year, accompanied by your favourite brew, to dip into at random and make some space for reflection. Give it to all your friends and family! The pieces are short (some only a page), and a mind-stretching joy to browse.

I’m old enough to still love the weighty-tome gravitas of the printed volume in the above photo, but of course, most of us will read this digitally. It’s freely available as PDF | EPUB, and the PDF takes on greater interactive qualities when viewed in Frode’s Reader hypertext tool. Here’s his demo of this and the other tools he’s been inventing…

Alert to the challenge of digital preservation (“we’re writing in sand” as Frode memorably states about digital texts) — they’re working on a physical edition with the entire text micro-engraved into plastic and metal for longevity.

Frode kindly invited me to contribute a chapter, which gave me a much appreciated pause for thought on the 30 years I’ve spent using hypertext to create interactive visualisations of dialogue and arguments, and in the last decade or so, learning from my NLP and machine learning colleagues. So, here’s my letter to the future: The Future of Text in Three Moves.

Many congratulations also to Niko Grupen, whose piece From Author to Editor: Our Place Alongside the New Life Cycle of Text (p.148) scooped first prize in the Student Competition! His punishment is to read a signed Visualizing Argumentation e-book cover-to-cover over Christmas 😉

Doug Engelbart (RIP) is the fire driving both Frode and me (his influence on my career) — so for old time’s sake, here’s when Doug and Frode Heglund visited me in 2004 🙂

Learning Analytics: Ascilite 2011 Keynote

Ascilite 2011 banner

Learning Analytics: Dream, Nightmare, or Fairydust?

From today’s keynote at Ascilite 2011, here’s the podcast plus the slides. I am grateful to Gary, Renee and everyone else at Ascilite for their understanding and flexibility, since after months of planning this trip, unfortunately I could not be there in person after my father passed away last weekend.

For those of you who like to download and watch offline: podcast [Hi-Res version: 93.3Mb] + slides [PPTX/PDF]

For detailed descriptions of work presented here, see other posts tagged learning analytics and the references below.

Abstract

Pervasive digital technology is weaving a fabric around our lives which makes it increasingly hard not to leave digital traces. We are experiencing an unprecedented explosion in the quantity and quality of data available not only to us, but about us. While some people find this blanket suffocating and threatening, for others, it marks an exciting new turn in our cultural evolution. The question for us is: what are the implications for learning?

One answer is it’s time to upgrade our computing kit. The learning platform and business intelligence vendors are rolling out analytics dashboards aggregating data into summary views, and will be a source of innovation as they seek to respond to customer needs — but what will institutions be asking for? It is conceivable that government education departments might see potential for league tables based on them.

Another answer is that, at last, we will have an evidence base previous generations of educators and academics could only dream of: real-time data streaming in from our students, even more from data shared by countless others who are happy to reveal their social networks, geo-location, and recommended books. Previously siloed scholarly datasets are now released into the wild, where they can be harvested and mined in a vibrant ecosystem of connected ideas, learners and educators.

Then there are those of a more cautious nature. So what if we have shedloads of data? Now we can drown faster. Learning, enquiry, argumentation, sensemaking, scholarship, insight — these skills are of an entirely different order, the highest forms of meaning-making, uniquely human. And what have analytics to say about the less tangible 21st Century skills that we need to nurture if the next generation is to manage the unprecedented complexity and uncertainty that they will inherit from us? Surely data analytics have nothing to say about intrinsic disposition to learn, emotional resilience in the face of adversity, the ability to moderate a discussion, resolve conflict, or ask critical questions? Finally, who is in control of analytics: are they tools to study learners, or tools to place in their hands, to create reflective, more agile individuals and collectives?

Analytics may in time come to be used to judge you — as a learner, an educator, or your institution. The challenge for us is to debate what it means for this new breed of performance indicators to have pedagogical and ethical integrity. What can and should we do, and what are the limits? Do they advance what we consider to be important in learning, teaching, and what it means to be a higher education institution in the 21st Century?

Are you thinking Dream, Nightmare, or Fairydust?

Biography

Simon Buckingham Shum’s work on sensemaking, collective intelligence and knowledge cartography inform his thinking about the role of technology in shaping the future of learning in higher education, and at school level. His background is in Psychology (B.Sc., York), Ergonomics (M.Sc., UCL) and Graphical Argumentation for Design Rationale (Ph.D., York). He is Senior Lecturer in Knowledge Media and Associate Director (Technology), at the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. Within the OU he served on the Steering Group for OpenLearn, and as Director of SocialLearn. He served on the Steering Group who organized the 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK11), and is LAK12 Program Co-Chair.

Key refs:

Buckingham Shum, S. and Deakin Crick, R. (2012). Learning Dispositions and Transferable Competencies: Pedagogy, Modelling and Learning Analytics. Proc. 2nd International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge. (29 Apr-2 May, 2012, Vancouver, BC). ACM Press: New York. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/32823

Ferguson, R. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2012). Social Learning Analytics: Five Approaches. Proc. 2nd International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, (29 Apr-2 May, Vancouver, BC). ACM Press: New York. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/32910

De Liddo, A., Buckingham Shum, S., Quinto, I., Bachler, M. and Cannavacciuolo, L. (2011). Discourse-Centric Learning Analytics. Proc. 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge. Feb. 27-Mar 1, 2011, Banff. ACM Press: New York. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/25829

Ferguson, R. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2011). Learning Analytics to Identify Exploratory Dialogue within Synchronous Text Chat. Proc. 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge. Feb. 27-Mar 1, 2011, Banff. ACM Press: New York. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/28955

Digital scholarship: towards ontological shift

Just stumbled across this summary slide from the Computational Thinking seminar I gave in Edinburgh in 2007, on how digital media might change scholarship [slides]:

4 years later, I think we can see signs of the ontological shift starting to register in the collective consciousness, “but it’s unevenly distributed” to borrow from William Gibson’s memorable description of the future.

Modelling Scholarly Debate: Neil Benn PhD

Another of the Hypermedia Discourse group’s students, Neil Benn, passed his thesis viva in July, with a strong defence of his dissertation Modelling Scholarly Debate: Conceptual Foundations for Knowledge Domain Analysis Technology. Co-supervised with John Domingue (KMi) and Clara Mancini (formerly KMi and now in Computing), Neil’s work picked up the challenge raised in previous work by the group (IJHCS article), namely to use a  constrained set of “Cognitive Coherence Relations” (CCR) to model in a uniform way the relationships between publications, people and arguments.

I’m really excited about the result of the work, as summarised in Neil’s abstract:

Knowledge Domain Analysis (KDA) research investigates computational support for users who desire to understand and/or participate in the scholarly inquiry of a given academic knowledge domain. KDA technology supports this task by allowing users to identify important features of the knowledge domain such as the predominant research topics, the experts in the domain, and the most influential researchers. This thesis develops the conceptual foundations to integrate two identifiable strands of KDA research: Library and Information Science (LIS), which commits to a citation-based Bibliometrics paradigm, and Knowledge Engineering (KE), which adopts an ontology-based Conceptual Modelling paradigm. A key limitation of work to date is its inability to provide machine-readable models of the debate in academic knowledge domains. This thesis argues that KDA tools should support users in understanding the features of scholarly debate as a prerequisite for engaging with their chosen domain.

To this end, the thesis proposes a Scholarly Debate Ontology which specifies the formal vocabulary for constructing representations of debate in academic knowledge domains. The thesis also proposes an analytical approach that is used to automatically detect clusters of viewpoints as particularly important features of scholarly debate. This approach combines aspects of both the Conceptual Modelling and Bibliometrics paradigms. That is, the method combines an ontological focus on semantics and a graph-theoretical focus on structure in order to identify and reveal new insights about viewpoint-clusters in a given knowledge domain. This combined ontological and graph-theoretical approach is demonstrated and evaluated by modelling and analysing debates in two domains. The thesis reflects on the strengths and limitations of this approach, and considers the directions which this work opens up for future research into KDA technology.

The thesis is published as a KMi Technical Report:

Benn, N.J.L. (2009). Modelling Scholarly Debate: Conceptual Foundations for Knowledge Domain Analysis Technology. Doctoral Dissertation, available as: Technical Report KMI-09-04, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-09-04.pdf

A distillation of work midway through the project was presented as:

Benn, N., Buckingham Shum, S. Domingue, J. and Mancini, C. (2008). Ontological Foundations for Scholarly Debate Mapping Technology.  2nd International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA ’08), 28-30 May, 2008, Toulouse, France. IOS Press

HypER 2009: Hypotheses, Evidence & Relationships

You know that feeling that you’ve come home? I recently joined a 2-day workshop at Elsevier’s Disruptive Technology Labs, Amsterdam, where an exciting group of people shared what is clearly a harmonic convergence that’s been waiting to happen for a long time. HypER: Hypotheses, Evidence & Relationships is the name we gave ourselves. From the nascent wiki homepage:

The next step in the evolution of the digital research infrastructure is the detection, navigation and analysis of  Hypotheses, Evidence & Relationships in the literature: the building blocks of knowledge-level claims.

This community brings together researchers in argumentation, computational linguistics, sociology of science, hypermedia, semiotics, semantic and pragmatic web.

Check out the participants and presentations from Day 1, and the ensuing activity streams to take this forward… such as intersection with the W3C Scientific Discourse working group.

What makes this particularly exciting from the perspective of our Hypermedia Discourse group is that we’ve been working since 1998 on tools and theory for human-annotation of discourse relations, while meantime, the machines have been getting smarter at extracting certain forms of these from traditional scientific texts. Now, as I argued in my presentation, there’s potentially a marriage made in heaven for us to really move the knowledge infrastructure forward, out of the shadow of the printing press, into a network-native environment that takes seriously the power of the social/semantic web. Moreover, it takes seriously the pragmatic level of communication by recognising the rhetorical role that different statements play in scientific communications.

My specific argument on the human+machine annotation synergy is that no matter how smart the machines get, we will always need human annotation of hypotheses, evidence, and discourse relationships, and very high quality user interfaces (Slide 10):

Researchers read meanings into texts that are not there, and with which the author might disagree

  • so we will always require manual annotation tools
  • we need ways to make connections to connections
  • extremely complex connections may remain the province of human sensemaking (e.g. is analogous to)

Good user interfaces will be needed

  • to view, edit and navigate HypERnets, whether manually or automatically constructed

Scientific discourse is a social process

  • we take huge care in our writing about how we position ourselves in relation to our peers — will we trust unsupervised machines to extract and position our more complex claims?
KMi HypER 2009

View more from sbs.

Digital Scholarly Discourse

I wrote this recently as a 1-pager to a foundation, which more or less sums up how I’m thinking right now…

Digital Scholarly Discourse

It is premature to applaud the Internet as the next Gutenberg revolution until it similarly transforms our core assumptions about how knowledge can be most effectively disseminated, analysed and debated.

In the shadow of the print journal

1665 was a milestone in the history of intellectual technology. Within months of each other, the French and British academies published Le Journal des S

Joint PhD with NASA

Human-Agent Collaboration for Distributed Sensemaking and Action

3 year studentship sponsored by NASA Ames Human-Centered Computing group: to be filled as soon as possible:

The Challenge

What will scientific publishing, collaborative modelling, or internet argumentation look like when ideas might be agents, arguments can be monitored, and agents can provide active support to analysts working over time and space? What are the human and computing challenges, how would you investigate them, and how would you validate your work?

We invite candidates to read the linked resources, and write a research proposal following the guidelines.

You are…

…passionate about developing tools for mapping human knowledge, and inventing and understanding new kinds of user experience with software agents. You will have a keen interest in human-centred computing, bringing Java and/or Web programming skills, and a relevant background in one or more of: multi-agent systems, conceptual modelling, argumentation, knowledge engineering, collaboration tools, user interface design, usability evaluation. You will be a team player, capable of working collaboratively at a distance and across timezones, but able to initiate new ideas, and work to agreed objectives.

We’re looking to fill this position as soon as possible, so get in touch if you are interested!…