Cook, Holliman and O'Malley

[Crossposted to Doug Clow's blog]

John Cook

Slides available in Slideshare.

Snapshot 1 - Cooperative Problem-Seeking Dialogues in Learning. (2000) to Snapshot 2 - Going for a Local Walkabout: Putting Urban Planning Education in Context with Mobile Phones. (2009)

Musica key feature throughout.  MetaMuse designed to adaptively structureinteractions between pairs of cooperating learners - decisions madeabout traversing State Transition Networks (STNs). AI basis.  Lisp/Macbased.  Generated musical ideas fast so they could getverbalisation/externalisation leading toself-regulation/self-diagnosing - problem-seeking.

Picking up models of how pairs of cooperating learners.

Nowat London Met, strange news lately, Learning Technology ResearchInstitute. Prof of TEL, half-time helping university with e-learning. Apocket of excellence in the RAE.  RLO CETL, FP7 project CONTSENS,mobile learning, work with Agnes Kukulska-Hulme.  Urban area study,capturing pictures/VR as they go around. GPS-triggered events, show youold photographs/newsreels of the same area. Students work in pairs tosolve tasks.  Schools started looking like prisons, then flatter. High-end phones (HTC Diamond/N95), builtin voice recorder for captureof notes.

Continuity - the song remains the same?

User data still at the centre, and adaptively structuring interactions.

Importantresearch issues: equity of access to cultural resources for education;learner generated context; appropriation; mobility and learningpathways; informal learning.

Informal learning has taken him to being an Investigative DJ on blip.fm.

Rick Holliman

Diversemedia in here, multiple streams of information, affects how we use andproduce information.  Particularly interested in science communication.

Abstract done as tweets - key events.

FollowedMartian invasion - meteorite harbouring fossilised remains of ancientbacteria (?). Very controversial - was it an artifact or a realmicrofossil?  Much tabloid interest; interested in how sciencecommunicated in the media.

Then Dolly the sheep, 1997. Keyquestions - why is there only one sheep? Because the scientists doingit didn't expect it to work, so used genetic material from theirfreezer ... and then it did. So some controversy in the scientific -but not public - media about whether she was an actual clone becausethe background testing not done.

Another thing at the same time... shift in to online word in terms of news, around the UK generalelection. Guardian Unlimited, Electronic Telegraph.

Finger-lengthratio: established in the womb, dependent on hormone balance at thattime.  That's fairly clear, but what that means in later life is muchless clear.

Broadsheets changed from broad to tabloid , orcompact, or Berliner. Categorisation becomes difficult - and newspapersexist in multiple formats too.  'Elite and popular' almost works forprinted media, but not for broadcast or online.

Language is changing, the way we describe things is also changing: abuse of vowels and pronouns is rife. The result of txting?

Many complexities of consumption and production, and data collection and analysis.

Claire O'Malley

Hernew boss was on the Dolly the sheep team ... and he has finished whereshe's finishing.  Twenty years from NATO Advanced Research Workshop1989, to CSCL 2009.

Conference proceedings in 1989 used a cartoonof 'Computer-Supported Co-operative Learning' showing a teacherstanding on a computer (Mac SE) as a podium, pointing at a blackboardwith 'E=mc^2' (shared representation), computer supporting interaction(!) but not getting in the way of teacher-student interaction (lookingat each other).

Shared representations - several projects.Conceptual Change in Science. Ros Driver. 1980s, Ideas still here inlatest project. More recently: Ambient Wood (Yvonne Rogers) - samething but the technology is different. Get students to investigate realthings, unmediated, but script the investigation (scripting is CSCLcurrent buzzword) - give them representations of those.  Now PersonalInquiry (PI) with Eileen Scanlon et al.  Again, new technology but ideathe same: unmediated science, mediation to help learners talk about it.

Anotherstrand - communication. Shared ARK - Josie Taylor, Simon BuckinghamShum. Video-mediated communication with shared science simulation.Real-world question about whether to run or walk in the rain. (Answeris a brisk walk.) High-quality analogue video, real time, even enabledeye contact. (Cool!)  Video-Mediated Communication - link to superfastJanet ATM connect, very high-bandwidth digital video early/mid 90s -two video streams at once! Focus on talk that was produced. Task - samemap, other instructs on a route using talking-heads video.

Interesting snippets of findings from all this video:

Despite the quality of connection - bandwidth, latency, eye contact - people don't talk the same wayas if they were face-to-face.  They just don't.  Whether in next room or acrosscontinents.  The task can be differentially affected by that.

Soif you want a bargain and you're on dodgy ground, use the telephone notthe video. If your case is strong, use video because you can persuademore.

People think that if they're on a video, they'll somehowleak the truth when they're trying to deceive.  Likewise, they thinkthey can pick up lies from others.  But people are awful at spottinglies on video, and if they do leak the truth when trying to deceive,it's by voice, not by what they show.

People who can see each other tend to say less than on audio-only channels; gestures - nodding etc - are crucial to maintaining smoothness of interaction.

LEADproject - EU-funded - mediating f2f communication with computers usingtext chat ... like we're doing now in this conference with the Twitterbackstream.  Good route for more interactive lectures.

DigitalReplay System - these contexts produce great streams of data that takeages to analyse and make sense of.  National Centre for e-SocialScience, to help people make sense of large datasets like this.  Digital ethnographyThings like auto-analysis of head-nodding.

Onthe 'Horizon' - new EPSRC Digital Economy Hub - at Nottingham -research on ubiquitous computing, big building.  Cloud computing,specks etc ... very many people you don't know will have a lot of dataabout you that you don't know. How do we make it acceptable for peoplethat they do? How do we deal with issues of privacy, identity, security?