CALRG 30th Anniversary – Session 2

[Crossposted to Cloudworks]

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)

Music a key feature throughout.  MetaMuse designed to adaptively structure interactions between pairs of cooperating learners – decisions made about traversing State Transition Networks (STNs). AI basis.  Lisp/Mac based.  Generated musical ideas fast so they could get verbalisation/externalisation leading to self-regulation/self-diagnosing – problem-seeking.

Picking up models of how pairs of cooperating learners.

Now at London Met, strange news lately, Learning Technology Research Institute. Prof of TEL, half-time helping university with e-learning. A pocket 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 you old photographs/newsreels of the same area. Students work in pairs to solve tasks.  Schools started looking like prisons, then flatter.  High-end phones (HTC Diamond/N95), builtin voice recorder for capture of notes.

Continuity – the song remains the same?

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

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

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

Rick Holliman

Diverse media in here, multiple streams of information, affects how we use and produce information.  Particularly interested in science communication.

Abstract done as tweets – key events.

Followed Martian invasion – meteorite harbouring fossilised remains of ancient bacteria (?). Very controversial – was it an artifact or a real microfossil?  Much tabloid interest; interested in how science communicated in the media.

Then Dolly the sheep, 1997. Key questions – why is there only one sheep? Because the scientists doing it didn’t expect it to work, so used genetic material from their freezer … and then it did. So some controversy in the scientific – but not public – media about whether she was an actual clone because the background testing not done.

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

Finger-length ratio: established in the womb, dependent on hormone balance at that time.  That’s fairly clear, but what that means in later life is much less clear.

Broadsheets changed from broad to tabloid , or compact, or Berliner. Categorisation becomes difficult – and newspapers exist in multiple formats too.  ‘Elite and popular’ almost works for printed 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

Her new boss was on the Dolly the sheep team … and he has finished where she’s finishing.  Twenty years from NATO Advanced Research Workshop 1989, to CSCL 2009.

Conference proceedings in 1989 used a cartoon of ‘Computer-Supported Co-operative Learning’ showing a teacher standing on a computer (Mac SE) as a podium, pointing at a blackboard with ‘E=mc^2’ (shared representation), computer supporting interaction (!) but not getting in the way of teacher-student interaction (looking at each other).

Shared representations – several projects. Conceptual Change in Science. Ros Driver. 1980s, Ideas still here in latest project. More recently: Ambient Wood (Yvonne Rogers) – same thing but the technology is different. Get students to investigate real things, unmediated, but script the investigation (scripting is CSCL current buzzword) – give them representations of those.  Now Personal Inquiry (PI) with Eileen Scanlon et al.  Again, new technology but idea the same: unmediated science, mediation to help learners talk about it.

Another strand – communication. Shared ARK – Josie Taylor, Simon Buckingham Shum. Video-mediated communication with shared science simulation. Real-world question about whether to run or walk in the rain. (Answer is a brisk walk.) High-quality analogue video, real time, even enabled eye contact. (Cool!)  Video-Mediated Communication – link to superfast Janet ATM connect, very high-bandwidth digital video early/mid 90s – two video streams at once! Focus on talk that was produced. Task – same map, 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 way as if they were face-to-face.  They just don’t.  Whether in next room or across continents.  The task can be differentially affected by that.

So if you want a bargain and you’re on dodgy ground, use the telephone not the video. If your case is strong, use video because you can persuade more.

People think that if they’re on a video, they’ll somehow leak the truth when they’re trying to deceive.  Likewise, they think they can pick up lies from others.  But people are awful at spotting lies 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.

LEAD project – EU-funded – mediating f2f communication with computers using text chat … like we’re doing now in this conference with the Twitter backstream.  Good route for more interactive lectures.

Digital Replay System – these contexts produce great streams of data that take ages to analyse and make sense of.  National Centre for e-Social Science, to help people make sense of large datasets like this.  Digital ethnographyThings like auto-analysis of head-nodding.

On the ‘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 data about you that you don’t know. How do we make it acceptable for people that they do? How do we deal with issues of privacy, identity, security?