http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39632.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1391

Jinni claims to help you find movies, TV shows matching your taste watch online. I spent a few minutes training it and it’s not that great yet, but I do have eclectic tastes which might mess with its algorithms a bit and the system is obviously still growing.

What is interesting about it is its combination of expert opinions/classifications, machine intelligence (they talk of a movie genome that uses a rich ontology, akin to the music genome that led to Pandora) and collaborative filtering. It is clearly trying to marry the top down and bottom up in an interesting way. The model they seem to be using allows for the bottom-up to become more prominent as time goes by. I suspect that, as the user-base grows and the cold-start problem lessens, that this might turn out to be quite useful.

In its combination of sophisticated (and apparently recursive) algorithms and human input it is a fine example of a collective application. The use of two distinct strata of human input (the experts and the rest of us) gives an extra twist and a potentially richer dynamic than the usual fare.

Its use of an ontology offers benefits of parcellation as well as a richer set of ratings than the usual ‘this is good’ approach. In addition to the usual movie metadata, the main divisions are ‘experience’ and ‘story’, with each aspect subdivided into many other subtypes. The ‘experience’ aspect is particularly interesting, parallel in some respects to my own CoFIND system’s use of qualities, albeit in a more structured and less user-led form. The structure serves a purpose, though, allowing them to automate tagging once the system has been trained. If it works, this might help to overcome the problem of spiralling complexity and everlasting cold starts that have proved to be a stumbling block for CoFIND.

I look forward to seeing how this develops.
Created:Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:10:57 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39582.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1390

The figures speak for themselves and are pretty much what I would have expected on the whole, but one or two caused me to do a double-take. This one surprised me: YouTube’s bandwidth costs per day are about $1,000,000. That’s $365m per year on handling 13 hours of uploaded video every minute and well over 100m videos viewed every day. I guess it doesn’t seem that expensive when you think of it that way.

Created:Sat, 24 Jan 2009 19:46:50 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39386.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1389

A terrific talk by Joseph Parr of Plaxo. This video explains the technologies behind social sites very clearly. It’s an hour long but, if you’re interested in developing social applications and you’re not sure where to begin (or even worse, you *are* sure but haven’t heard of these standards) then it’s a great introduction.
Created:Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:22:08 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39309.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1388

A simpler, primitive but very usable and less over-technologised system than Wordle that takes some plain text (or HTML from ANY web page) and turns it into a tag cloud. I saw Wordle when it was relatively young (months, not years ago!) and it was slightly more like this, though even then had some novel output options and was less developer-focused than TagCrowd. TagCrowd generates very clear legible, standards compliant, HTML/CSS but little else. They profess a desire to build an API, but it has none yet. Even so, sometimes simple is beautiful. A nice little system.
Created:Sun, 11 Jan 2009 10:32:53 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39250.html

 http://www.edutopia.org/james-gee-games-learning-video

A marvellous video from Edutopia featuring James Paul Gee in which he presents some very persuasive arguments for games and social media in education. More importantly, he challenges how school education is done in the US (although there are local differences this is much the same as it is done most of the world when you get down to basics, and pretty much the same as much of university education, especially in the sciences) and offers some ways out. Not much is new in what he has to say, but he says it very well. Enjoy!

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39192.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1387

A great study by James Fowler (the same James Fowler who discovered that obesity is infectious through social networks) and Nicholas Christakis. It seems that happiness ripples through a population. Thankfully, it ripples slightly more effectively than sadness.

Their conclusion:

“People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.”

The research is an offshoot of the remarkable Framingham Heart Study, instigated in 1948 and carried on through generations of volunteers. The experimental methods seem to have effectively dismissed the possibility that the effects are a result of random clustering, homophily or confounding factors like joint experience of an economic downturn or neighbourhood upheaval.

The results are fascinating. We are 15% more likely to be happy if someone with whom we have a close connection is happy. The effect is greater than the unhappiness caused by unhappy close people. As a result, the better connected our friends and family are, the more likely it is that we will be happy:

“Happy people tend to be located in the centre of their local social networks and in large clusters of other happy people. The happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network.”

Becoming happy is a good thing for all concerned – an unhappy close friend becoming happy increases the chance that we will become happy by 25%. If the friendship is reciprocal, it increases the effect by 63%. Interestingly, friends and next-door neighbours have more effect than spouses, which may partly be explained by the fact that happiness spreads faster through same-sex relationships (they don’t discuss gay relationships though!).

Physical proximity is very important – the effect decays noticeably, even between next door neighbours and those a few doors away. As the study looks at data from 1971-2003 it is hard to draw any conclusions about the effects of computer-mediated relationships and the authors are careful to point out that they can only speculate on the mechanisms for transmission. It could be anything from the effects of happiness on behaviour (generosity, helpfulness etc) to the direct effects of smiling, to the influence of pheromones.

The authors observe that educated people are generally happier than those who are not (and, incidentally, that women are generally sadder than men, but that’s another issue). I’ve wondered in the past about how we could adopt an infection model of education. This gives another driver that could make it work. Happy people are generally better educated and happy people get better connected. So education can have a disproportionate effect on happiness that goes beyond the benefits to the educated. This is good news all round and further proof (if it were needed) that the absurd notion of treating students as customers should be relegated to history. The customer of education, it bears repeating, is society, not the student.

Created:Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:58:00 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39189.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1386

Great study by Duncan Watts (of Six Degrees fame) that shows we are at least as influenced by what we perceive that other people think of a song as we are by the quality of that song.

It is all down to cumulative advantage – the early bird catches the work then the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Quite aside from what this tells us about democracy and many other processes, this is at the heart of a fundamental problem that we need to overcome when designing social software, be it Google or Facebook or anything down below. Tricks such as parcellation, delay, limited sampling and so on can help, but as long as we have the channels to reinforce poor choices (be they Justin Timberlake, George W. Bush or Blackboard) then the problem will persist.
Created:Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:01:12 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39183.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1385

Wordle is a great little application that can create a tag cloud out of pretty much any text or website. It’s a neat way of summarising large texts, kick-starting a tagging system, getting the weltanschauung of a community and much much more. Maybe as importantly, it is good fun!
Created:Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:39:05 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/39184.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1384

I’ve extolled the virtues of Slashdot before, but it bears repeating. I am still amazed by things like this – a question that interests many web developers and web masters is answered by many individuals in many different ways, then Slashdot uses the crowd to take care of the rest, quite literally evolving (in a strongly Darwinian sense) a dynamic and adaptive learning resource of extraordinarily high quality. Better still, if you don’t like the shape of that resource, you can tune it more precisely to your needs, altering thresholds, adjusting weightings according to your belief in the person posting, using value tags in the moderation drop-down box and so on, which in turn contributes to the overall shape and value of the resource to others. This goes notably beyond scrutable user models. And of course, to top it off, you can contribute yourself and/or ask questions of the crowd-teacher which, if they are half-way sensible, are likely to be answered promptly and helpfully. This is social constructivism at its best.

Slashdot is one of the most elegant, highly evolved learning environments on the Web and it works without a teacher in charge and without the explicit top-down enforcement of styles and standards of Wikipedia. Remarkable.
Created:Mon, 29 Dec 2008 10:34:59 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/34433.html

I was listening to the wonderful Lucifer Chu talking at the E-Learn 08 conference the other day when something he said struck a big chord. He was talking about edutainment and open content but it suddenly occurred to me that we (mostly) don't have a formal means of incorporating learners in our development processes for online learning. This is silly, especially where courses are, like most online courses, developed in advance of delivery. So here's the idea…

Alpha courses – 0.1 releases

Alpha courses are not those belonging to a curious christian sect, but those that are released for free to a select group of learners who can help us evaluate what we have produced. When we provide alpha courses we give students accreditation for free, but ask them to help identify in great detail what is good and bad, what we do well and what we do badly. We would have to assume that the content would have been produced using more traditional processes so there would be few concerns about factual content – the biggest problems would likely be pedagogic at this stage. This is not the end of the world as these weaknesses in the course would notably be outweighed by the metacognitive reflection that such a process would engender. Given such potential weaknesses, these courses would be most suitable for mature, reflective learners and, although the feedback would be very valuable, we would have to be wary that such learners are atypical.

Beta courses – 0.9 releases

The beta course would be a more general release intended to iron out the wrinkles and tie up the loose ends.   These would be offered at a considerable discount and, again, accredited. As the course would probably be close to its final version, we would expect to get a much broader range of learners on board and could evaluate it in a more authentic context than the alpha version.With luck we would get a lot of feedback both by analysing usage and seeking commentaries from learners.

1.0 releases

Once we have incorporated feedback from these learners, we would release the final course at the usual paid-for rates and it would go through the usual revision processes.

Why bother?

Most e-learning development methodologies (e.g. ADDIE, PADDE etc) incorporate an evaluation phase, but this is fiendishly difficult to manage in an authentic context and is usually either quite expensive or quite skimpy. In real life, we tend to release courses that are as good as we can make them but, given that they are almost always untested (at least in higher education), are inevitably imperfect. In fact, pretty much like beta software. Using alpha and beta releases of courses would provide feedback from real learners with real needs, as well as enabling learners who are excluded for reasons of cost from participating in traditional courses. There is undoubtedly a cost involved but the benefits, in terms of quality control and consequently improved reputation and retention, would probably far outweigh the costs, especially if we could work out how to limit participation in the early stages. Our courses would be notably better tailored to the needs of our learners. Better still, it would enable us to use a lighter weight development process, perhaps based on RAD processes and maybe even something akin to XP, to let us produce courses more quickly and efficiently than older methods. Better still, such a process would lend itself more naturally to flexible and social courses, where learner engagement in a community is a prerequisite for success and very hard to gauge in advance. And just to round it off we would get a lot of useful information on the demand for a course before committing big resources to the project. There might even be some good research spin-offs.

It is a modest proposal but I think, if implemented with care and rigour, it could make all the difference to the courses we create. The process might be useful in traditional face to face courses, but the big value would come from those that are online where there tends to be more up-front development, feedback is less rich and immediate and (in many cases) it tends to be harder to adapt as we go.

I haven't tried to search very carefully for instances of this being done already. Perhaps it is an old idea (apart from anything else we all iterate development of courses and the idea is implicit in the development of open educational resources) but I haven't yet come across reports any attempts to formalise this process. Whether novel or not, I like it.