Planet Gold Coast

These are the 5 stages of Twitter acceptance according to Rohit Bhargava:

I think I have successfully made it to stage 5, but would be interested in the opinion of my Twitter followers.

A number of people I know such as @spidie and @SarahStewart have entered into the spirit of the Flickr365 project where you upload a photo a day for a year. This is an excellent way of recording your personal history in significant detail. @spidie even went further and found a convenient site, TwitterGram, to upload the daily photo to Flickr and to generate an alerting tweet. Even with this aid it still is a not insignificant daily chore to take the photo and upload to Flickr, even though the benefits are substantial.

In trying to think of an automated solution brought to mind a lifelogging experiment I tried a couple of years ago with a modified version of my DotWikIE single-page wiki tool, which records contents of the clipboard every 5 seconds, and subsequently with the TimeSnapper application. I also used the ControlC site to keep an online encrypted copy of my clipboard contents. Sheepishly I have to admit I ran this in the background for several months before I remembered about it. On checking the site I discovered lots of embarrassing information like credit card numbers, login names and passwords, product keys, and so on in my clipboard stream. Touch wood, their encryption must have been strong as I have yet to knowingly suffer any consequences, and have deleted all entries on their site and disabled the ControlC capture service.

I decided to have another look at TimeSnapper and discovered in the intervening 2 years their product has progressed significantly. It even was able to update the screen snapshots from 2007 into their new format. They have optimised the screen capture rate and lowered the storage requirements. I decided to look at my computing activities on 1 February 2007 in their viewer and generated a quick screencast (somewhat blurry to protect exact details):

This movie showed a varied workload across 3 or 4 main time segments shown across the top of the screen, in fact the TimeSnapper stats show I used my computer for only 4.75 hours in total. However the activities include:

• check of weather radar and download of podcasts (prior to cycle ride)
• reading emails
• checking Bookcrossing.com activity
• creating and populating a SharePoint site before coffee
• a little blog reading
• a long spell of curriculum/course outline generation in Word
• creating and installing a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine
• check the notes online and then act as co-MC for a student awards evening
• start Visual Studio install then watch (a lot of) TV
• check movie times, play music, read email and more blogs

In other words, my day in screen dumps, all generated automatically, and recalled easily after 2 years.

So I am running TimeSnapper again rather than joining in with Flickr365.

I enter just a short note that 20 years today I started work at Bond Uni. It is customary to expand on the occasion but I am not in a reflective frame of mind in this post-festive time. For the moment I simply recall the initial euphoria and community spirit when money was no object, the dark days of Bond in receivership, near-fail and the threat of moving to Robina Town Centre, the impecunious years of long hours with no reward before Bond became truly independent, and then the current expansionary period. The years have gone quickly but I am left feeling ambivalent about whether for me these years might have been better spent on other endeavours. Certainly the Gold Coast itself has been a great place to live although the population explosion is starting to take its toll on our infrastructure.

Two or three weeks ago I upgraded to Picasa 3 and am pleased with its improved, cleaner user interface. For the last couple of years I have used Picasa web albums to publish my photos for public viewing. It was only today while I was adding a web album for our 41st wedding anniversary  that I noticed the new movie making feature for the first time. Even though I had only a few photos I gave it a whirl and am impressed by the simplicity and ease with which a YouTube HD movie can be created and uploaded. Herewith the result:

With friends and colleagues becoming enamoured with Animoto recently it is interesting to compare the two services. I generated a meetup with some friends a week ago on Animoto. Uploading the slides to the Animoto site is more painful, although adding music from the built-in collection is easier. There is little to choose between them. Animoto certainly wins though with its creative animations of the slides:

In common I suspect with many iPhone owners I am continually surprised by the ingenious apps, many free, that appear in increasing numbers. Yesterday I downloaded the MotionX-GPS Lite app and gave it a whirl during our walk at Burleigh. At the start of the walk I just pressed Start and carried the iPhone in my usual bum bag. With the hot day and a somewhat later than usual start time we kept under the occasional shade of the Norfolk pines – the tide was high so no beach to walk on this time. On the way I used the same app to geotag a photo or two. It seemed to work flawlessly and at the end of the walk, with a short rest on Nobbys lookout, it produced the following:

I simply chose one of the geotagged photos to represent the track and changed its name. With a click of the Email button a couple of track files and the photo were sent to my chosen email address. The message contains a temporary link to show the track on Google Maps which expires on 5 Jan 2009 (ie 7 days).

From the Google Maps page the user is offered a link to Google Earth if it is installed. I became fully enamoured with Google Earth during the 2008 Sydney-Hobart yacht race. This year for the first time a link to a Google Earth .kml file was provided which updated every 10 minutes. [However I suspect this was hacked at one stage to make it appear the incorrect yacht was leading the race – see tweet – it was too good to be true.]

I uploaded the .kmz file provided by MotionX-GPS to my SkyDrive public area here. This will trigger Google Earth to zoom to the track of the walk. Clicking on the Play Tour button shows a pleasant flyover effect along the track. I made a somewhat blurry YouTube video using Camtasia 6 to show the effect:

I think this is a pretty impressive outcome from a free iPhone app.

A few weeks ago I set an assignment called TwitterLicious as part of my new subject INFT345 Middleware. The idea of the TwitterLicious web application written in ASP.NET was to scan all the tweets if a given Twitter account name, identify all the tweets in that account containing URLs, and then create a Delicious link entry for each URL. This entry inserted special tags of choice and used the tweet text as the Delicious link entry description. Several excellent versions of TwitterLicious were submitted but CJ’s version was the best.

Given this background I was intrigued today to find via Read/WriteWeb the Web 2.0 TwitchBoard site which for its initial service appears to mirror TwitterLicious in its ‘save tweet links to Delicious’ feature:

TwitchBoard listens to your twitter account, and forwards messages on to other internet services based on what it hears. Our first service will automatically save any links you tweet to the del.icio.us bookmarking service.

TwitchBoard is very neatly linked to Twitter in that to sign up you simply follow @TwitchBoard from your own Twitter account. A direct message returns from TwitchBoard when you tweet links start to be processed. At the time of writing though the surge of interest in TwitchBoard has caused a waiting list to develop. I have still to receive my inclusion message and wait with bated breath. Having envisioned this very service myself I am obviously keen to participate.

For years almost I have in the back of my mind the directive ‘I must get more deeply into the semantic web’. However, the thought of linkbases and metabases, the mysterious RDF triples that are displayed 5 different ways, and vocabularies and ontologies in weird formats has always put me off.

You can imagine my excitement when listening to an ITConversations podcast entitled ‘Adding Semantics to HTML with RDFa’. Dubbed Semantic Annotation for (X)HTML, RDFa involves adding XHTML attributes, hence the ‘a’, containing simple values from which the normal content of RDF triples can be generated easily. No XHTML or XML elements are used so the usual web page publishing software and CSS styles sheets are not affected in any way. Imagine the simplicity of just adding attributes for the machine-readable semantic data to XHTML pages created as per normal.

The RDFa Primer which is a W3C Working Group Note envisages the following semantic transformation:

A cleverly-designed minimal set of attributes are introduced using existing attributes where possible:

• about – metadata resource (current page by default)
• rel and rev – relationship or reverse-relationship
• href, src and resource – partner resource
• property for element content
• content – where element content not accurate
• datatype – force data type
• typeof – for  RDF type(s)

There are several benefits but the main one are publisher independence in that each site can use its own standards, data is not duplicated (DRY, do not repeat yourself), and XHTML and RDF values appear in the same document but are easily separated with existing tools.

Of course you are encouraged to use existing vocabularies where they exist. An example using Dublin Core taken from the Wikipedia entry is:

Of course it is one thing to mark up the content, but display tools are needed to augment browsers and the like to make use of the semantic data in useful ways. The Semantic Radar Firefox extension alerts the user in the Firefox status bar to the presence of RDFa information in a page and giving access to the generated triples and RDF data:

It is to be expected that Creative Commons has already adopted RDFa so when you generate a licence and copy the resulting XHTML to your web site or blog it will contain RDFa attributes built in:

Digg is also using RDFa as can be seen by inspecting the XHTML of a Digg page but for some reason Semantic Radar does not find it.

Discovering RDFa has begun to change my attitude to the semantic web and I will now follow progress with anticipation.

Some fun via Peta:

552 Petrology

Michael Rees = 39381528559 = 393+815+285+59 = 1552

Class:
500 Science

Contains:
Math, astronomy, prehistoric life, plants and animals.

What it says about you:
You are fascinated by the world around you, and see it as a puzzle worth exploring. You try to understand how things work and how you can make them better. You might be a nerd.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Not sure about the prehistoric life, plants and animals though.

Here are a couple of examples of a tagcloud ‘abstract’ (see my earlier post) of the paper entitled ‘Towards the Integration of Social Media with Traditional Information Systems’ presented by Peta Hopkins and myself at ICCMSN2008. Commenting on the earlier blog post Natasha Baker liked the tagcloud abstract idea and pointed me to TagCrowd which allows you to upload a text file of a document. I reduced our paper to text and TagCrowd generated:

Note that only the top 50 of the 962 different words are shown.

Of course I couldn’t resist running the same words through my favourite Wordle site, although here you have to copy and paste the text into a web form rather than nominating a text file.

Note how the Wordle tagcloud abstract is more detailed and picturesque. I must say that as an abstract I prefer the TagCrowd version.

In a recent post from one of my favourite bloggers, Martin Weller, he postulates:

It seems to me that your tag cloud becomes a sort of shorthand for your online identity. In the future we won’t swap business cards (even cool Moo ones), but rather tag clouds. Perhaps dating, and recruitment services will be run by matching the compatibility between tag clouds?

I think it’s a great idea and up there with an idea from Peta Hopkins where she was heard to suggest that all reports, papers, and similar documents should have a tag cloud as part of their abstracts. She hasn’t blogged about this particular idea yet but has mentioned tag clouds a few times.

Judging from my teaching during the last semester I am edging slowly towards the new role for the instructor as espoused by Mark Pesce below. Instead of feeding my students my favourite links to resources I had them discover the resources for themselves. Did it work? Yes, in part. Perhaps 80% of my semester 083 cohort had good searching skills and collected useful resources, and some even blogged the links. It seems I have to refine my own approach and will do so when next I have a suitable teaching opportunity – in two semesters’ time.

The role of the instructor has changed as well; as recently as a few years ago the lecturer was the font of wisdom and source of all knowledge – perhaps with a companion textbook. In an age of Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter this no longer the case. The lecturer now helps the students find the material available online, and helps them to make sense of it, contextualizing and informing their understanding. even as the students continue to work their way through the ever-growing set of information. The instructor can not know everything available online on any subject, but will be aware of the best (or at least, favorite) resources, and will pass along these resources as a key outcome of the educational process. The instructors facilitate and mentor, as they have always done, but they are no longer the gatekeepers, because there are no gatekeepers, anywhere.

From Mark Pesce ‘Inflection Points’

I simply record here the text of an email I sent to my Associate Dean Teaching & Learning that mentions a Will Richardson post about a long, provocative and thought-provoking post about fluid learning  by the famous Mark Pesce.

Since your last message concerned the wording of acceptable use of laptops by students in class I thought I would pass on a blog article by a reasonably respected educational technology expert, Will Richardson. Will’s blog post about the Ultimate Disruption for Schools is in his words ‘stuff that makes my head shift and hurt at the same time’ can be read at:
http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/the-ultimate-disruption-for-schools/

It is a commentary on a much longer article by futurist Mark Pesce, seen as a judge on ABC TV’s New Inventors. Mark’s article on Fluid Learning is much longer and more provocative:
http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94

If you think it appropriate you might pass these links on the FBTSD staff.

Kent Anderson posts about science teachers but I think his ideas extend to all scientists. One of the main problems with the apparent decline in maths and science is ascribed to the inability of scientists to keep society informed of their work and its benefits. This suggestion by Kent sounds a very good one to me:

Millions of students are trotting around with camera cell-phones. Imagine if they could snap a picture of an interesting bug, cloud, rock formation, or plant, and find out from a scientist what it is. Science education would be interactive in a whole new way, and “teachable moments” could occur more spontaneously.

I can visualise a Twitter-like system for posting the photos and geolocation and receiving replies. Web 2.0 software developers, how about it?

I had to invigilate an open final examination (open to the Internet and Google!) for one of my subjects this morning. Arriving at the appointed computer laboratory I discovered with dismay there was no clock, probably the first prerequisite for an exam room.

We commandeered a spare machine and thought to use the Date/Time control panel applet only to discover that access to this is banned, even for instructors’ accounts - we obviously can’t be trusted not to change the date on our institutional machines.

Being an advanced web applications class it was not long before one of the students discovered this online stopwatch that counts up and down:

We had to choose a machine that all students could see and remember to deactivate the screensaver.

The online clock worked well, and I was ready for a second exam later in the morning when the same situation arose. Hopefully others will find this useful, but it is an expensive clock!

I found the post by Craig Thomler entitled ‘Government Etiquette on Twitter’ fascinating and full of discerning take-aways about Twitter. A few are picked out here:

• ‘Twitter is a very loose two-way mechanism. Its design does not foster the level of debate that is supported via a forum or allow for the level of indepth personal commentary (with comments), as does a blog.’
• ‘The two things it does really well are placing short stream of consciousness messages, announcements and comments into the public eye and allowing for brief Q&A style exchanges of views, without enormous depth or follow-on.’
• ‘It it less used as a method to respond to customers and constituents - but in its two-way mode can be used to gauge public satisfaction and collect top-of-mind responses as part of a consultation process.’

There is more to read but I have to admire the near-perfect level of concise description presented in a series of pithy paragraphs, one per opinion or subtopic. The post fills exactly one screenful on my wide-screen monitor and comes close to my idea of the ideal blog post.

A tweet alert from @deswalsh drew me to a post by Lee Odden reporting an interview with Richard Binhammer from Dell. As Des’s tweet indicated there are some discerning comments. The first that struck me is the concept of what Dell calls the ‘Connected Era’:

Rather than static sites, the Web has become the global information technology infrastructure that underpins a rich, interactive and fully featured way to communicate and connect. At Dell we call it The Connected Era

The result: it is easy to connect, communicate  and share information with others.  You can now find information you want—when you want, as well as share that information and your own perspectives.  That’s why it is social.

There is much more in the post than I can comment on here but I will end with a belief that I fully share with Richard who says:

… social media is contributing to a significant change that take[s] us from what I call the “traditional, rational, objective, institutional” perspective to a more “subjective, emotive, personalized and human” perspective.

Photo taken by Aaron Spence of Panedia.

See original report and update.

I now have the link to the impressive panorama taken by Aaron Spence of the attendees of BarCamp Gold Coast 2 on Saturday 29 November 2008 (see previous report) and published on his Panedia site. I appear in the circle but you have to be patient to see me with PhD student Matt Carter and undergraduate CJ Petrich as we appear at the end of the 360º sweep. The quick and efficient way these panoramas are captured in a vertical shot and 6 horizontal shots on the straightforward tripod mount is always marvellous to see.

Aaron also took many still photos and has put up his BarCamp collection on his photos site. It was very easy for me to subset the photos with which I had a link by signing up for a free account at the Zenfolio site and creating my own BarCamp Gold Coast 2 gallery (click the Slideshow link). The photos feature me, Matt and CJ.

I would very much like to thank Aaron for the excellent job and the work he did to put up the photos and panorama.

Another informative section of the Sarah Perez post mentioned by me was about continuous partial attention. I thought I understood this condition but the much-revised and authoritative wiki page by Linda Stone describes how continuous partial attention is different from multi-tasking that I had assumed was a synonym.

Linda gives an excellent discussion although why she commits the typographical sin of setting whole paragraphs in italics is surprising. I eventually found a more concise definition of continuous partial attention on the father of all wikis, Ward Cunningham’s C2:

An activity or mental state of accommodating multiple information streams. A survival strategy for today’s youth. An opportunistic strategy similar to, but not the same as, multitasking (which is more about productivity/efficiency than scanning for opportunity).

A term coined by LindaStone …

Note that one side effect is "knowing about a lot of things, but not knowing a lot about any one thing".

I’ll be more careful in future when describing students as multi-tasking – a term used commonly in computer science and hence in the forefront of my mind.

40 years ago this year in my own student days I recall my Oxford lecturer, Christopher Strachey, giving sage advice about accessing information. In essence he said ‘No need to commit facts to memory, just remember who to ask or where to find it quickly’. He was prescient as this advice is so much more relevant to today. Currently the ‘who’ is Twitter followers and the ‘where’ is the searchable Internet, with a judicious touch of information literacy to allow us to judge the quality of the returned results.

It has taken me a while, though, to follow through the ramifications for teaching the students of today. A blog post from Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb entitled ‘Education 2.0: Never Memorize Again?’ brought the point home that ‘rote learning is a waste of time’. She points us to Don Tapscott’s Times article ‘Google generation has no need for rote learning’ with some juicy quotes (truths?):

Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is.

and

Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google.

Although I have never articulated in exactly this form I have been using this approach for my final examinations in all my web application subjects over the last two teaching semesters. Using the online test engine in our local Blackboard LMS I have been setting what I term ‘open book and open Internet’ exams. Between 40% and 50% of the marks are allocated to practical programming/designing tasks for producing parts of web applications during the exam. However, the remaining marks are allocated to short answer questions where the students have full Google and any other searching capability.

I have been careful to set parts of questions that I feel are not easily answered by a quick Google search (no definitions required in answers, and students asked to give informed opinions about topics and technologies that can apply in given example situations/problems). So far the spread of marks has been typical of those for written exams, so I believe the experiment is working well so far. Certainly none of my students need to employ rote learning, thus hopefully mirroring the context of their future careers more closely.