OUseful.Info, the blog…

What do P2PU, the University of Mary Washington (UMW), and a joint venture between the National Research Council of Canada (Institute for Information Technology, Learning and collaborative Technologies Group, PLE Project), The Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University and the University of Prince Edward Island have in common? The answer is that they either have, or are about to, run open online courses, at undergraduate level, for free, on the web.

In the case of P2PU and the Canadian joint venture, the courses were run without credit. At UMW, the DS106 Digital Storytelling course ran for the first time in 2010 as a for credit course for registered UMW students, albeit largely in public. In 2011, it has run as a course with loose boundaries, open to all whilst at the same time providing a recognised course offering within UMW itself. In each case, the course duration was of the order of 10 weeks.

With HE in the UK going through a phase of soul-searching around the question of “where’s the money going to come from”, it could be argued that we need to start doing some work around business model innovation. So here’s one of my starters for ten… (I have floated this internally, and no-one’s picked up on it, so I feel as if I’m not giving away anything away by posting it here…)

The idea is simple: a recognised award offering body offers a module or course container that will allow participants in online courses to receive recognised academic credit points based in part on their participation in an open, online course, in part on their reflections about what they learned on the course.

What follows are initial (probably naive) thoughts on how it might work…

The module is inspired in part by the International Baccalaureate’s CAS (Creativity, Action, Service) component as well as HE level course modules developed to recognise work based or prior experiential learning; it provides a means by which paid for assessment may be decoupled from course delivery. To try and address concerns, the proposal in the first instance is that the container be used to award credit for students who have freely participated in one of a recognised number of open educational units, for example from the OU’s OpenLearn website or one or more courses offered by P2PU (subject to agreement).

OpenLearn Courses: participation in these courses is based on individual engagement with the course material, informally supported by one or more forums or social spaces open to all. This model allows us to explore the extent to which purely independent learning within a controlled open courseware context provides an appropriate context for accredited independent study.

One or more OU Uncourses/Learning Journey Courses (or open, online courses run by academics in other institutions): a significant part of the original course material drafted for the Relevant Knowledge short course T151 Digital Worlds was authored over a 15-20 week period on a public blog hosted on wordpress.com. The materials posted combined elements of personal learning diary as the OU author explored the subject area, as well as learning devices borrowed from the OU’s tutorial-in-print style of writing (in-line exercises, self-reflection questions, and worked through tutorials, for example). By running one or more new “learning journey” courses, such as in areas where material is being drafted for fully fledged future OU courses, where material is timely (for example, in response to a BBC series or short term skills gap (such as the opening up of data in central and local government)), or where there exists considerable vendor produced third party training material albeit in a poorly structured form as far as course design goes (for example, Google tutorials around Google Apps, or Google Analytics, or the Yahoo User Interface libraries), we can: i) pilot the open course container model; ii) create useful open resources “for the common good”; c) draft course materials for possible formal (paid for) OU course offerings.

P2PU Courses: P2PU runs 10 week courses for small cohorts starting throughout the year. Learners engage with each other as well as the course resources and course instructors. Recognising participation in this sort of course allows us to explore the extent to which an open accreditation module can be used to recognise participation in semi-formal courses. Recognising participation with P2PU courses also provides an opportunity for the OU to develop ties to the Mozilla Foundation, who support P2PU and are keen to see it develop a range of semi-professional courses based around the open web and open software development.

How the Container Works

The container awards credit based on the fulfilment of several criteria:

- demonstration of engagement with, or participation in, a recognised open, online course; this requirement means we know that learners were at least exposed to a certain of content we recognise;

- a reflective assessment component; this may take the form of a reflective essay, or piece of project work arising from the course and a critical review of that work.

- optionally, results from quizzes provided during the course. These not only demonstrate engagement with the course, but also provide some means of demonstrating a particular level of attainment in particular topic areas through computer marked assessment.

In the first instance, accreditation is offered for independent study based on participation with one of a limited number of pre-identified open online courses. In this way, we could artificially limit the range of subject areas and course models engaged with by the initial batches of learners to a know set of approved courses. This approach allows us to mitigate the risks involved with a prove the model and allow the course model to develop in a carefully controlled way.

The OpenLearn Context (2011I-2011L)

To a certain extent, the idea is based on a particular vision of how we might go about assessing participation in open online courses run outside the OU. However, I think it might also be used to provide a way in to formal study for students wishing to take formal OU awards based on prior engagement with OpenLearn materials.

By accrediting engagement with two OpenLearn based units derived from current Technology short course/Relevant Knowledge programme courses, we can compare achievement levels across formal and informal presentations of the material. For example, if material from Relevant Knowledge short courses in the their final presentation are released to OpenLearn immediately prior to the final presentation, we can engage learners around course material that is concurrently being offered in a supported fashion as an officially recognised OU course through the VLE, and informally via OpenLearn. As such, we can explore the extent to which an open course container might: i) extend the life of a course; ii) provide alternative pathways to credit and assessment models for students interested in a particular topic area but not necessarily interested in “named credit” for a course.

The Uncourse/Learning Journey Context

As institutions such as the OU continue to innovate in the areas of informal and semi-formal education through OpenLearn and emerging practice in Digital Scholarship, the uncourse/learning journey, originally inspired, in part, by the notion of “misguided tours”, provides a framework for digital scholars to record their learning journey through a new subject area as a learning pathway that others might follow. By employing writing devices that well are proven in the delivery of “tutorial-in-print” style learning materials, the learning diary becomes a piece of instructional material in its own right. Through openly recording the learning journey, and ideally engaging with other learners interested in the topic area, the author should also remain free to negotiate the future direction of the learning journey (hence its declaration as an ‘uncourse’) and so discover a curriculum that fairly reflects the learning needs of its participants.

The P2PU Context

If, as seems likely, ad hoc open online courses continue to emerge as a consequence of: a) the increasing availability of high quality content that can be put to use as a learning resource, even if not originally designed as one; b) the growth in online social networks and an apparent desire and willingness for learners to come together and participate in semi-structured learning directed activity, there will be a growing market for recognising participation in such activities and acknowledging it in some way. Through recognising participation in P2PU courses in certain areas, it may be possible for HEIs to develop closer ties with the Mozilla Foundation and engage with open courses in areas complementary to formal offerings (e.g. in the OU’s case, the Web Certificate, Open Source Tools and Linux courses). Such engagement provides opportunities for using P2PU courses as a marketing channel similar to the way in which OpenLearn units may be used, as well as providing a continuing education context for alumni in areas where an institution may not provide courses. P2PU may also provide a slightly more structured context than is offered by the uncourse/learning journey model for the developmental testing of formal course materials as they are being developed for fully fledged distance online courses.

What’s in it for folk offering online courses?
An obvious argument against the above approach is that folk running courses may get upset that someone else if offering (for a fee) accreditation around their course materials. (I always thought non-commercial could be a Bad Thing ;-) However, a couple of benefits come to mind.

Firstly, the institution offering the accreditation may pay to advertise on the site offering the course. (Yes, I know this might seem as if it’s a way for an institution to essentially outsource its course production and delivery, and in a way it is… But if open courses take off, and if they offer educational benefit, and if there’s value in proving to someone else you have taken an open course, and if HEIs don’t start offering certification around open courses, then someone else will. Such as an organisation like Pearson…

Secondly, by accepting that participation in a course can be used as partial fulfillment of requirements for the receipt of formal academic credit, it reflects back some of the authority of the award offering body on the course, showing that the course has something of educational value to offer.

Isn’t the Audience Limited?
Open educational courses aren’t for everyone; they require some element of motivation on the part of the learner, they are often best followed in a social way. At times they may lack structure, and instead focus on resource investigation activities, which can be hard for learners who prefer very heavily structured courses with linear narratives and “teacher” leading from the front. But if you want to develop skills and a model of learning that helps you exploit the power of the web, then open courses may help you on your way…

Conclusion
Err, that’s it… ;-)

Related: Massive Open Online Courses – All You Need to Know…

As I get was getting increasingly annoyed by large flashing display ads in my feedreader this morning, the thought suddenly occurred to me: could Google serve me ads on third party sites based on my unread Gmail emails?

That is, as I check my feeds before my email in a morning, could I be seeing ads that foreshadow the content of the email I’ve been ignoring for way too long? Or could I receive ads that flag the content of my Priority Inbox messages?

Rules regarding sensitivity and privacy would have to be carefully thought through,m of course. Here’s how they currently stand regarding contextual ads delivered in Gmail (More on Gmail and privacy: Targeted ads in Gmail):

By offering Gmail users relevant ads and information related to the content of their messages, we aim to offer users a better webmail experience. For example, if you and your friends are planning a vacation, you may want to see news items or travel ads about the destination you’re considering.

To ensure a quality user experience for all Gmail users, we avoid showing ads reflecting sensitive or inappropriate content by only showing ads that have been classified as “Family-Safe.” We also avoid targeting ads to messages about catastrophic events or tragedies. [Google's emphasis]

[See also: Ads in Gmail and your personal data Share Comment]

Not quite as future predictive as gDay™ with MATE™ that lets you “search tomorrow’s web today” and “[discover] content on the internet before it is created”, but almost…!

It’s also a step on the road to Eric Schmidt’s dream of providing you with results even before you search for them. (For a more recent interview, see Google’s Eric Schmidt predicts the future of computing – and he plans to be involved.)

Here’s another, more practical(?!) thought – suppose Google served me headers of Priority Inbox email messages that were also marked as urgent through Adwords ads, in a full-on attempt to try to attract my attention to “really important” messages?! “Flashmail” messages delivered through the Adwords network… (I can imagine at least one course manager who I suspect would try to contact me via ads when I don’t pick up my email! ;-)

Searching the internet of things may still be a little way off though….

PS thinking email address targeted ads (mailads?) through a bit more, here are a couple of ways of doing it that immediately come to mind. Suppose I want to target an ad at whoever@example.com:

1) Adwords could place that ad in my GMail sidebar; (I think they’d be unlikely to place ads within emails, even if clearly marked, because this approach has been hugely unpopular in the past (it also p****s me off in feeds ); that said, Google has apparently started experimenting with (image based) display ads in gmail;

2) Adwords could place the ad on a third party site if the Goog spots me via a cookie and sees I’m currently logged in to Google, for example, with the whoever@example.com email address.

As Facebook gets into the universal messaging game, email address based ad targeting would also work there?

PPS interesting – the best ads act as content, so maybe ads could be used to deliver linked content? Twitter promoted tweets – the AdWords for live news?. Which reminds me, I need to work up my bid for using something like AdWords to deliver targeted educational content.

A couple of posts out today on the Guardian Datablog review the progress of the UK’s open government data project to date (Government data UK: what’s really been achieved?, Nigel Shadbolt: A year of data.gov.uk).

One of the pieces of the jigsaw that I think has been largely ignored in many of the discussions I have seen around open data is the extent to which open data is incorporated into the productive workflow of an organisation, rather than just venting the data exhaust of an organisation every so often and pretending something useful has been released…

One of the reasons commonly given for why organisations should open up their data is the idea that a more effective use of your data may well be found by someone else: for example, by identifying previously unimagined ways of unlocking value, or exploiting network effects that arise from being able to merge one dataset with another.

But it seems to me that the data should also be useful to the organisation that released (otherwise, why collect it?), and that one way of making the most of open data stores is to put the data to work, by requiring day-to-day users of the data to access it via the datastore (an “eat your own dog food” argument…).

If data is collected and reported on within an organisation, then consideration should be given as to whether the workflow associated with that data might pass through an open data store, or whether the open data store might provide a view over data as it passes through that workflow. Where data is reported in a public (and maybe even just FOIable) way, submission of the report – for example, to a Ministry – might pass through the open data store. That is, rather than local gov sending data based reports to central gov, central gov picks up those reports from the local gov’s open data site.

That is: in cases where public institutions are currently expected to push open data and reports based on open data to other public institutions (or maybe other internal departments), they should start pushing that data to public/open datastores, and let the other party pull the data from that public data store.

What this means is that the business of data is, wherever possible, is mediated through open and public datastores. [RELATED: list of local government data burdens]

Another approach that I think might hold promise is for local councils to develop on their own, or in partnership with other councils or private enterprise, data driven sites in areas where they have a particular specialism or interest (which may include a potentially commercial interest), and then offer these services under a subscription basis to other councils across the UK and in so doing develop a national reach. For national scale delivery, it might be that this is handled by a commercial partner, with the original developing council taking a commercial stake and getting a return.

The national aggregation of local services idea is worth bearing in mind because we shouldn’t necessarily expect a user of a council data powered website delivering location based or location related services to know which council a particular location falls in.

For example, (and I know this isn’t a council service…), something that is done locally but at national scale is blood donation.

The NHS Blood donor service site provides a means of identifying the time and place for local collection sessions. It may well be that the the data is generated on a regional basis, but why should there be any more than a single place to go to find out this information?

Here are some more examples of services started locally that might scale:

RateMyPlace – food inspection ratings, currently for a handful of councils in the Staffordshire area.

Who Owns My Neighbourhood? – identify council owned land and buildings, currently in the Kirklees area.

Your Ceremony – venue hire and registrar booking for civil ceremonies, via East Cheshire council.

It’s not just councils who might initiate these vertical, cross-council vertical data or service sites of course. For example, FixMyStreet is a MySociety site for reporting local issues relating mainly to the built environment, such as potholes. FixMyStreet engages citizens in the human level instrumentation of local neighbourhoods, changing attitudes as it does from “the making of complaints” to “the reporting of issues”. FixMyStreet also offers other issue tracking features such as the ability for issues to be “closed” when they are fixed. I don’t find it hard to imagine that councils might pay a small subscription for additional reporting and management tools built around the FixMyStreet workflow, although the practicalities of that might be very different! The FOI requesting site What Do They Know could also be seen in a similar light as a workflow for managing FOI requests.

Architecturally, there may be several different approaches to the design of these sites, and how to engage with them. For example, if a site has a write API, or can import data from a variety of document formats, albeit ones structured in a particular way, a council might easily write or upload data that can be normalised and presented in a consistent way by the aggregating site.

For councils that do publish data, but in an inconsistent way, aggregators such as OpenlyLocal attempt to scrape the data and normalise it to provide a uniformity of access to data, in a consistent from, across council regions.

Where aggregation sites normalise data and represent it via an API, it provides an opportunity for third party developers or vendors to invest in the production of single application that can be configured to present localised views over the data to individual councils, or allow council developers to share widget code with other councils.

Sites that aggregate local data at national scale are thus beneficial in several ways:
- they provide consistency of experience for folk who move between areas and mask boundaries between the sources of data (which is fine, if everyone os reporting in a consistent way…);
- they minimise the need for a user to know which council area they are in;
- they provide the ability to compare activity across neighbouring regions;
- they provide the opportunity for additional services operating at national scale to make use of the data.

PS if you know of any other councils that have developed vertical sites, ideally data driven ones, such as RateMyPlace or Who Owns My Neighbourhood, that could scale nationally and mask council borders, please add a link in the comments:-)

A good place to look for new services may be workflows where there is the production of standardised reports, e.g. to central government or using standard procedures, and perhaps more revealingly, standard forms! That is, if every local gov inspector across the UK users form bZ23/A to file a particular sort of report, it could suggest that a data driven service around that data might scale to a national level… or not;-)

PS for a corollary to this – data horizontals with a local focus, see Greg Hadfield on local news sites “re-inventing themselves as local data hubs” (Open-data cities: a lifeline for local newspapers).

Last week, I was fortunate enough to receive an invitation to attend the Texts and Literacy in the Digital Age: Assessing the future of scholarly communication at the Dutch National Library in Den Haag (a trip that ended up turning into a weekend break in Amsterdam when my flight was cancelled…)

The presentation can be found here and embedded below, if your feed reader supports it:

One thing I have tried to do is annotate each slide with a short piece of discursive text relating to the slide. I need to find a way of linearising slide shows prepared this way to see if I can find a way of generating blog posts from them, which is a task for next year…

The presentation draws heavily on Martin Belam’s news:rewired presentation from 2009 (The tyranny of chronology), as I try to tease out some of the structural issues that face the presentation of news media in an online networked age, and constrast (or complement) them with issues faced by scholoarly publishing.

One of the things I hope to mull over more next year, and maybe communicate in a more principled way rather than via occasional blog posts and tweets, are the ways in which news media and academia can work together to put the news into some sort of deeper context, and maybe even into a learning (resource) context…

Earlier today, the OU VC and other assorted dignitaries took place in a session on Preventing a funding crisis in higher education: addressing the outcomes of the spending review and Browne review. A live stream of the event was available, and encouraged the participation of a small number of interested parties on the #unifundingdebate Twitter hashtag backchannel. About two thirds of the way through the event, I managed to grab this overview of the Twitter echo-chamber that resulted:

The nodes represent individuals who used the hashtag and the lines correspond to arrows that go from an individual to the people they follow on Twitter. The nodes are sized according to the number of other hashtaggers following them, the colour (blue to red) show how many other hashtaggers that person follows. So small red means you follow lots but aren’t followed by many, and large blue suggests lots follow you but you aren’t following them back.

Anyway, the debate (not that it really was a debate, from what I could tell?), touched in part on the role of both widening participation, and part-time study. And whilst there was some consideration of how the part-time, distance ed approach represented an alternative way of doing a degree, there seemed to be widespread, implicit agreement that the current degree model is still an appropriate one.

I’m not so sure…

The following is a bit of a ramble, and is largely off the top of my head… but it’s something that’s been in mind for a bit, and I need to start trying to articulate it and develop it a little further than random thoughts on occasional dog walks….one of which I just happen to have come back from…

A model I’m trying to pull together at them moment is based more on a situation where a a student spends one or two years of quite intense, formal study getting into the swing of what independent learning might mean, albeit independent learning in the sense of no-one making you work through structured teaching materials, rather than folk learning informally from unstructured materials in an autodidactic way.

This short, intense period gives the provider an opportunity to hook the student into a subscription package (for a fee…) that will contain to provide them with educational support, training, and current awareness about dominant trends and ideas in a subject area for the rest of their career, and maybe beyond.

Other packages might support the serious hobbiest, or ‘leisure learner’, particularly in subjects such as arts appreciation (art history, for example) or ‘expert amateur’ subject areas such as astronomy.

The package will taken mainly open content, but with added value from the way it is packaged and how it can be made available in a timely way for the subscriber. The content will also flow to the subscriber through the subscription channel from the host institution. Subscription upgrades will provide the subscriber with additional benefits, such as access to structured/vertical search contexts, or commercial academic content.

Top-up learning delivery then creates a new distribution context to support learning, where the academic passes on current awareness knowledge about an area that keeps the subscriber student informed about their subject area. It helps them keep on top of it and up to date with it. The university subscription becomes a channel for the professional updating of subscribers. Like Independent Radio News syndicates news to commercial radio stations, professional societies might also push content through the universities’ subscription channels.

Supporting such a model would require a shift in the way that the academy engages with perpetual (‘lifelong learning’?!) subscription students. Distance education models can help, but there is also the opportunity for bespoke events (lectures, public talks, privileged access to university members, evenings with…) and specialist conferences. It is noticeable that media providers such as the Guardian are already exploring such models in the news media domain.

Which is maybe where the sort of thing I try to do every day fits in? I live, by and large, through a screen, with occasional presentations at workshops, conferences and hackdays. Every day, I try to learn something new, or ask a not-obvious-to-me/Emperor’s-new-clothes type question of something I’ve come across, and use my notebook blog to record what I’ve learned.

Two or three times a week, I get a comment, tweet or email about an old post, or a current one, from someone who’s tried to make something of what I’ve done, or someone asking for an opinion about, or guidance on, something loosely related the topics covered in OUseful.info. These request may come from within the OU, or without. Sometimes, these are quickly answered, sometimes they set a new challenge or puzzle to solve, which in turn results in another blog post/notebook entry. By posting in public, these posts become discoverable by other people who are interested in similar topics, or are faced with similar problems/puzzles.

Through services like Twitter – which is usually open on my desktop most of the day – I often (several times a week) participate in what might be termed “distributed flash consultancy”, picking up on “anyone know…?” type questions, or coming together for a short amount of time with two or three others to tackle some easily stated puzzle or problem. I am an active participant in the LazyWeb. I treat my cognitive as surplus. Of course, my employer may take issue with that. But whenever I see emails coming round about things like “knowledge transfer”, I take heart, because I engage with knowledge transfer, albeit at the microtransaction level, several times a day, with folk from diverse professional and governmental, as well as academic, communities. THis always make people laugh, but I think it’s true: to paraphrase William Gibson, I believe that I catch glimpses of the future that is already around us, (and maybe even invent additional tiny pieces of it), and try to help distribute it a little more evenly.

Thinking back to subscription models of continual top-up, drip fed education, that’s likely to be at the micro-level too. Not the macro-degree level. Maybe not even the meso-course/module level, though the provision of 20-100 hour top-up courses, or evening, half-day, or one- or two-day training courses might also fit into this scale. But the micro-level. The question you get stuck on you need the lecturer’s help on. The question other people might get stuck on. The question the academic might turn their “always on cognitive surplus” to, to help you solve your problem, and in return generate another example, another case, for a growing body of really fine grained open-educational materials. (The micro-meso boundary can blur, of course… some problems may take a day or two to work through.) And for the subscriber, after a few years of engaging with drips in a trackable way, maybe their undergraduate degree can get an upgrade (for a small, additional fee) to a Masters? (Hmmm, now where does that remind me of…?)

So here’s what I do… I participate in a knowledge sharing, creating and sharing again network. Every day. An open network. I help solve problems, and I also create new ones (often with the intent that their solutions might become good teaching or learning examples). It’s just that the transactions I do in the network, I haven’t found a way of monetising yet, which is what I suspect my employer will be increasingly keen on… But in the world of open knowledge, cash isn’t the only indicator, is it? (Journal publications are another, for example… hmmm ;-)

For all the talk in the funding crisis debate today about what new models might emerge around university funding, I think the point that there’s a global network of knowledgeable folk and open information resources has been missed. I’m not a team player, I’m a network player. And whilst some might argue that we may always need teams, I think we’ll increasingly make use of networks and ad hoc comings together too. The thing is, our higher ed institutions haven’t yet figured out how to play a pivotal role in the distribution of sound academic knowledge in a network that’s open to all. Remember when the libraries were the access point for knowledge…? I wonder when someone will come along to give HE a similar wake up call…? By which time, of course, it will be too late…

PS in passing, I just spotted this: Adrian Hon on Why free online lectures will destroy universities – unless they get their act together fast

I don’t read academic journal papers very much any more, partly because folk rarely link to them, but today I read a paper (“Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data”, Edward Segel, Jeffrey Heer, IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 2010) in response to this video trail that brought it to my attention (Journalism in the Age of Data, Ch. 3: Telling “Data Stories”):

I encourage you to watch the video – not necessarily for what it’s about, but for the way that a journal article is used to hold bits of the video together. Note that the video is not just about the paper, but it’s not hard to see how a video could be made that was just about the paper…

So I wonder: should we be making voiced over “papercasts” of academic papers to provide a quick summary of what they contain, and maybe also enriching them with photos and footage relating to what the content of the paper is about? (I know this might not make sense for the subject matter of every paper, but if a journal paper is about a particular online tool, for example, here would be an opportunity to show a few seconds of the tool in use, and contextualise it/demonstrate it a little more interestingly than a single, simple screenshot can convey?)

UPDATE: @der_no tweets: “Always enjoyed technical papers preview @ #SIGGRAPH (esp considering many of actual papers are beyond me)” See an example conference papers trailer here – SIGGRAPH 2010 : Technical Papers Trailer:

If the conference matter is appropriate (robotics related conferences come to my mind, for example), couldn’t this sort of approach provide an additional legacy resource that can continue to give an event life after the fact?

PS I believe that several of the OpenLearn folk are also looking at ways of pulling together video and audio in the way they package their material, for example looking at the use of Xtranormal videos, or Slideshare slidecasts. (Note that it’s easy (or used to be!) to publish Xtranormal clips into Youtube, and Youtube clips can also be embedded in Slideshare presentations, so all manner of fusions of content become possible!)

PPS Very, very loosely related to the above is another thread I want to link in to, here. That is, the extent to which academics might take up various sorts of (“new”) media training to explore different ways of engaging with (and maybe helping reinvent?) scientific communication. For example, a recent initiative in the OU has seen more than a few brave academic volunteers engaging in podcast training as part of Martin’s Podstars project (I couldn’t find a better link?!).

Running parallel to this, the OBU’s media training team have been helping other academics put together short showreels that have since been published on the OU podcast site – OU Experts:

In terms of finding training materials that are already out there, it struck me that the BBC College of Journalism might be a good start, particularly in the skills area?

A couple of days ago, the Guardian reported a quote from Dimblebobs about Question Time being bigger than X-Factor on Twitter (How Question Time got as big as The X Factor on Twitter); so when are we going to see optional Twitter captions made available, either in real time, or on catch-up services such as iPlayer? (If you haven’t been keeping up: Twitter captions/subtitles are captions generated as an overlay for a video video based on tweets from members of a particular Twitter list, or using a particular hashtag. (In the future, it might also be worth considering the capture of tweets based on location?) Martin Hawksey has been developing several tools in this area: Twitter subtitling. His most recent demonstration – iTitle: Full circle with Twitter subtitle playback in YouTube (ALT-C 2010 Keynotes) – describes how videos of the ALT-C 2010 keynotes have been recently republished along with searchable Twitter captions).

As Martin hinted at in What they were saying: Leaders debate on BBC iPlayer with twitter subtitles from parliamentary candidates and in the comments to that post, the volume and rate of production of tweets for a popular live event may be too great to display them all via the caption feed and still give the viewer time to read them. Which means, for heavy volumne backchannels, tweets need filtering or sampling (ideally in a way that avoids undue bias?) in order to limit the number (and quality?) of tweets that are actually displayed as captions. So what are the options?

First of all, we should distinguish whether we intend to work on a live feed, or an archive feed. An archive feed means that samples or filters can be in part tuned according to a post hoc analysis of all the tweets; whereas the live feed may either work in a stateless way, judging whether or not to show any individual tweet based solely on its own merits, (for example, showing any particular tweet with given, fixed probability p), or based at least in part on the history of tweets already observed.

I think we should also distinguish between sampling of Tweets, versus filtering them. By sampling, I mean selecting each individual tweet according to probability p independently of any other information; by filtering, I mean selecting a tweet based on it or its metadata containing a particular term (for example: only selecting tweets from certain individuals, block tweets starting RT, and so on). Note that both sampling and filtering may feature in the selection of tweets for display, in either order (sample, then filter, or filter then sample), or in more elaborate combinations (sample, filter, sample, for example).

So what strategies are there..? Note that this isn’t a very principled list (been a long day!), and it is likely to be far from complete, but it’s a start, and something to mull over at least…

Sampling
- display every n‘th tweet;
- display the most recently received tweet in the last x seconds every y seconds;
- display any given tweet with fixed probability, p:

Historyless Filtering
- filter out rewteets (items starting RT);
- filter out tweets sent to a person (tweets starting @). (Note that this does mean we limit the extent to which conversations might be displayed);
- filter tweets based on some function of the number of friends and or followers a sender has;

History-based Filtering
- filter based on the number of tweets the user has already sent;
- filter based on properties of the hashtag network (for example, number of hashtaggers following an individual. I have classed this as a history-based filter because we need some knowledge of the hashtag community, generated from a history of tweets, in order to calculate hashtag network metrics;
- filter based on the extent to which tweets are appratently part of a conversation thread (e.g. construct a conversation graph in which @a mentions @b and @b mentions @a, and select all conversations greater than a particular length. Note that we might combine this condition with other conditions, such as “where @a and @b share more than m common followers”.

Note that the filtering approach may be used to either filter out tweets and prevent them from being displayed, or select tweets according a particular set of criteria that means they should be displayed. In addition, filtering may be deterministic or combined with a probabilistic sampling mechanism. For example, we may choose to display a tweet with probability p where p is a function of some ranking factor with value f. An alternative approach might be to generate a score for each tweet based on one or more ranking factor as described in the filter considerations above, rank the tweets by score, and then display the one with the highest score at any given time.

The history based approach may be used in real time, making selections based on the tweets observed (and/or maybe just the tweets displayed) so far (until now history), or, in cases where a Twitter caption file is being generated after the fact, through analysis of the whole hashtag archive corpus (total archive). So for example, it might be that the caption file is generated after the event for use only by catch-up viewers, with the expectation that live viewers would be able to entertain themselves direclty from a live Twitter feed in their own client.

In passing, a handful of things that recently caught my eye on Nick Lansley’s Tech for Tesco blog:

- Tesco Freeview experiment: apparently, “Tesco.com R&D has been given access to a 32kbps [broadcast] digital stream …” So? Nick Lansley explains further:

[M]ost Freeview set-top boxes can see a “Channel Zero” on channel 306 (multiplex C) but most set-top boxes can’t pick up (or indeed understand) the information contained in it. The [Tesco Technika or Dion branded box[es] with ‘Channel Zero’] … can read the content of this channel – it’s this channel I have been given access as a conduit to delivering content.
…
I can imagine getting marketing to sponsor a cookery show and allow compatible set-top box (or TV) users to get the ingredients listed on the screen at the push of a button and they use the remote control to quickly add one or more of them to their online grocery basket without getting in the way of the watching the show. Importantly, this would work whether the show is being watched live or played back via PVR (on future PVR-enabled boxes).

Interesting…. And also interesting to see how this compares with the pretensions of a “global online university” that has had a “close” relationship (i.e. gives them cash) with the BBC for years… ;-)
(Just by the by, I’m also reminded that Tesco has started producing straight to DVD films for sale exclusively in Tesco Stores (Tesco goes to Trolleywood), and wonder: will Channel 0 stream video trailers too…?!;-)

- How to make “Sat-nav” work inside a Tesco Store: over recent months, folk at several HEIs have started mulling over the notion of on-campus location services (e.g. to my knowledge at least: @stuartbrown and @liamgh at the OU, @alexbilbie at Lincoln; any others?). Once you get indoors, there’s a problem though, because GPS doesn’t work when line of sight is lost to the satellites… which makes indoor use difficult… One alternative is to use wifi triangulation, detecting the relative signal strengths of various wifi hotspots whose location you know, and calculating location based on that.

Which is what this post describes, along with several example use cases. (Again, just by the by, I notice Tesco previously has a patent in the wifi area: PERFORMANCE ENHANCING WIRELESS NETWORK CONFIGURATION). Of course, if your phone knows where you are, then so does the Tesco App. But then again, in shopping centre localisation/shopper tracking is old news (old Sunday Times article: Shops track customers via mobile phone).

- QR Codes are all the rage at the moment, aren’t they? As for example, QR codes now appearing on Tesco print ads, as are on-phone barcode canners (which make it easy to add things to your shopping list when you’re at home or possibly also take things off your shopping list once you add them to your basket in store…) Of course, QR codes are just one integration point between the physical world and the digital:

- SMS is pretty much universal, whereas smartphones aren’t. Here’s an example for a link request using SMS: Search the Tesco Recipe site using an SMS text message. How does it work?

- Type ‘COOK’ followed by two or three of the key ingredients you have observed.
- Send the message to 83726 – that’s “TESCO” spelt out on your phone’s keyboard.

and get a link back to a URL on the Tesco recipe site for a recipe containing those ingredients. All that’s needed for a full SMS round trip is a collection of tiny recipes, such as those published by @cookbook… (e.g. as described in this New York Times article: Take 1 Recipe, Mince, Reduce, Serve)

It’s easy for the online echo chamber to focus in on what Facebook and Google are up to… But don’t forget the real world… there’s a huge potential for evil there too…!;-)

Can’t sleep…:-( So here’s one of the thoughts that started gnawing away at me, and that may let me get back to sleep if I post it: what happens if Java dies? if this posturing from Apple about dropping support for OS/X comes to anything…

One of the promises of Java was that it was cross-platform, of course. And for whatever reason(s), Steve Jobs prefers native, rather cross-platform, code running on his machines…

One of the tools I’ve been playing a lot with lately is based on Java, namely the desktop application Gephi, IBM’s Many Eyes is also Java application, though it runs as a Java applet/plugin in a browser. (Hmmm, applet. I bet that narks Jobsworth…) So if Java support on the desktop dies, I’ll be p*****d off…

When my first, sleep deprived thought of “who cares if Java dies, we can just move to cloud services” thought occurred, it was quickly followed by: “hmmm, but what if those cloud services make use of Java clients in the browser…?” The cloud maybe good for some things, but at the end of the day, we need to run clients of some sort.

So if Java dies, where do we run to – or more specifically, what do we run away from? Apple doesn’t like Flash much either (is the same true of Air?), and via YouTube, Google has also been looking for an alternative to Flash for delivery of video streams; Silverlight doesn’t seem to have many takers, and there are already more than a few applications I can’t run in a browser because I don’t run Windows…

So what is a sustainable cross-platform future? Running HTML clients/UIs and pulling on backend services and storage that do run in the cloud (which may even be Java…!;-)?

PS Just by the by, earlier this week I caught a glimpse of the application calls available from an emerging web operating system that appears to be well on the road to development:

So can I now go back to sleep, please….?:-(

PS I did get back up to sleep, and woke up with two related half-remembered ideas in mind:
1) The GWT (Google Web Toolkit) “allow(s) you to write AJAX applications in Java and then compile the source to highly optimized JavaScript that runs across all browsers, including mobile browsers for Android and the iPhone”. So how general is the source Java that GWT can cope with?
2) Will we start to see more applications running in their own virtualisation containers, carrying just enough of an operating system of their own to let them do what the application calls for?

Every so often, I’ve posted about the erosion of a universal Google ground truth as Google rolls out personalisation features that tweak the ranking of search results presented to you based on what Google knows about you. So with a recent announcement from Bing about its search integration with Facebook, I started wondering: could academic subject librarians (in a professional capacity) start to influence the search results of their charges (students, researchers, academics), simply by developing a strong persona as seen by the search engines, and friending their patrons in a public way also visible to the search engines.

So what exactly did Bing announce? Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan described it in Bing, Now With Extra Facebook: See What Your Friends Like & People Search Results as follows: “Bing is now making use of it to show new “Liked By Your Friends” matches and Facebook-powered people search results.” Liked results (when they appear), are currenlty presented in a specially marked out “liked by your Facebook friends” listing (Danny’s post shows some screenshot examples). However:

[o]utside the Liked Results, Facebook’s data is not being used to reshape the “regular” results, the listings found from crawling the web. Rather, traditional ranking factors such as the content on the pages and how people link to them is used — similar to what Google does.
…
Like Results are also unique to each person. What I get depends upon who my friends are. Someone else, with a different set of friends, will see different links suggested.
…
One thing is certain. If you haven’t been paying attention to Facebook like buttons, get moving. There’s already some direct benefit in search, and chances are this will grow.

So, the question that immediately came to my mind was: if librarians become Facebook friends of their patrons, and start “Liking” high quality resources they find on the web, might they start influencing the results that are presented to their patrons on particular searches?”

That is: could librarians take on a role of “influential friends” in a particular topic area, much as a subject librarian helps guide a patron in a traditional library? Or how about recasting the idea of the “embedded librarian” as a librarian who is embedded in the network, and who role is essentially to provide SEO services for content they want to help their patrons discover? (This relates to the question: if discovery happens elsewhere, how can librarins influence that discovery? Is SEO of other peoples’ content in some way akin to a weak form of collection development?!)

Where else might this line of thinking take us? If the Goog can track folk signed into a Google Apps for Edu domain, such as open.ac.uk, could that network of people be used to influence search results somehow…?

Just by the by, here are a couple of other examples of how content published or curated by one person might appear in or influence* the results of a person they are socially or organisationally connected to:

- Explore Interesting, Personal Photos on Yahoo! Search describes how their “new ‘Facebook Album Search beta’ feature, [allows you to] find public albums from the friends and family you’re connected to on Facebook (after you have linked your Yahoo! and Facebook accounts)”.

- Is Google Custom Search Influencing Google Web Search? starts to consider how the curation of a custom search engine might influence the discovery or ranking of sites and pages listed the CSE in the general web search context. (Or by extension of the above, maybe CSEs curated by trusted sources in a Google Apps for Edu domain be used to provide additional ranking factors to searches run logged in members of that domain?) If CSEs do influence rankings, maybe CSE development is a form of collection development that can influence the search results of others at a distance (i.e. on Google web search?!)

*I think this is a distinction worth bearing in mind as things play out: the ability for one person to publish content that is directly favourably ranked in another person’s results, versus the ability for one person to directly influence the ranking of third party content that appears in another person’s results.

Search Histories, Personas and Profiles as Intellectual Capital

Given the above, let us suppose that an individual can gain influence over the search results of people they are connected to by virtue of the way they have “touched” the web. If we consider the actual searches made by an individual themselves, this may also have value (as for example when a search engine tunes the results it displays for you based on your persoanl search history). I’ve touched on this before, e.g. in the context of a discussion I had with Martin Weller a couple of years ago (Your search is valuable to us) that crystallised this idea out me that I keep coming back to – that your profile as a search engine user is something of value not only to an individual, but potentially also to an institution or a service. Which is to say: the combination of what a search engine knows about you (incl social circle, things you search for, click on, search history, etc etc) and how it uses that information to tweak your personal search engine ranking factors define a “search engine persona”, which is a valuable knowledge commodity.

I think this question then follows: should institutions develop role-based personas that run searches, Like things on the web and so on, that are the “property” of the institution and inhabited by individuals employed to the role (a user employed as web-embedded Science librarian must use the weblibrarian_science account for example), or the should the liking, research librarian search history and so on be carried out by individuals using their personal Google accounts? In the former case, when an indivudal leaves the role, they also leave behind the persona and the machine advantage it brings (e.g. in terms of pesonal search recommendations) they have developed.

Time was when academics used to leave behind valuable collections of books and papers (valuable in the sense of being a particular collection). We’re now getting to a stage where you if work with machines that learn from your actions, that learning is valuable. So who has a right to it? (I think it wouldnlt be too hard to push this argument into the realm of transhumanism and “downloading”?!)

PS It seems that Google+ may now be influencing personalised search results, tweaking them include public Google+ updates from members of your Google+ Circles: The latest update to Google Social Search: Public Google+ Posts