Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:34:07 +0000
From our very fruitful collaboration with Ágnes Sándor (Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble), comes this joint journal paper, setting out the conception of Contested Collective Intelligence that we’ve been developing in KMi, as exemplified through Cohere (human social-semantic web annotation and knowledge cartography) plus machine text analysis using Xerox Incremental Parser (mining written text for [...]
Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:20:16 +0000
Like our other knowledge cartography software tool Compendium, Cohere is a ‘horizontal’ application: it provides an extremely customizable visual language, and is agnostic as to the user community or field of application. This is what you want from a research platform that can serve as a vehicle for experimenting with new ideas, but the tradeoff [...]
Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:57:16 +0000
Like our other knowledge cartography software tool Compendium, Cohere is a ‘horizontal’ application: it provides an extremely customizable visual language, and is agnostic as to the user community or field of application. This is what you want from a research platform that can serve as a vehicle for experimenting with new ideas, but the tradeoff [...]
Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:47:37 +0000
Life is getting tough in the world of academia, with fewer funding calls and more competition for those that are available. The Institute of Education Technology (IET) is putting in a huge number of bids in January, about 12 I think. Those involved have been working day, night and weekends to get the bids written, [...]
Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:08:03 +0000
I joined Mike Sharkey (Apollo Group) and Chris Brooks (U. Saskatchewan) on a 3-way EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative webinar today – Learning Analytics: Institutional & Research Perspectives. The replay will be up in a month for non-ELI members, but meantime here’re my slides: Learning Analytics for C21 Dispositions & Skills View more presentations from Simon Buckingham [...]
Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:26:59 +0000
One of the joys of being a researcher is having the chance to work intensively on a common vision, with someone delightful who brings a sharp mind and complementary approach. In that vein, we had a hugely productive 6 week visiting OLnet Project fellowship with Ágnes Sándor, from Xerox. We are both concerned with the [...]
Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:10:36 +0000
We are delighted to announce the publication of a journal paper, in which we discuss the integration of Cohere with the output from the Xerox Incremental Parser (XIP). De Liddo, A., Sándor, Á. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2012). Contested Collective Intelligence: Rationale, Technologies, and a Human-Machine Annotation Study. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. DOI: 10.1007/s10606-011-9155-x http://www.springerlink.com/content/23n1408l9g06v062 [...]
Wed, 04 Jan 2012 08:15:19 +0000
Continuing the international Collective Intelligence in Organizations workshop series… http://events.kmi.open.ac.uk/cscw-ci2012 ACM CSCW 2012, 11th February 2012 – Seattle, Washington Collective Intelligence (CI) research investigates the design of infrastructures to enable collectives to think and act intelligently, and intriguingly, more intelligently than individuals. Technologies such as idea management or argumentation tools, blogs, wikis, chats, forums, Q&A [...]
Fri, 30 Dec 2011 23:35:39 +0000
Final blog post of the year, so I’m marking the life of my father, who passed away a month ago. His story, from his childhood in Hong Kong, disrupted schooling under Japanese occupation during WWII, and the way he made a life here in Britain from 1951, is sketched below. But here is his professional [...]
Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:09:48 +0000
We’ve recently launched The Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) — an inter-disciplinary network of leading international researchers, exploring the role and impact of analytics on teaching, learning, training and development. As these fields get to grips with the Big Data explosion, techniques for making sense of patterns in that data, and predictive models that [...]
Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:50:07 +0000
In an earlier post on Knowledge Art, a term coined by friend and colleague Al Selvin, I opened with this question: What does it mean to be literate in crafting representations that help a group make sense of the world? Arguably, this is a literacy of first order importance as we confront novel challenges of [...]
Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:47:06 +0000
Learning Analytics: Dream, Nightmare, or Fairydust? From today’s keynote at Ascilite 2011, here’s the podcast plus the slides. I am grateful to Gary, Renee and everyone else at Ascilite for their understanding and flexibility, since after months of planning this trip, unfortunately I could not be there in person after my father passed away last [...]
Thu, 17 Nov 2011 05:44:41 +0000
A new draft of What Do We Think? Divining the Public Wisdom to Guide Sustainability Decisions is now available. Download PDF
Sat, 15 Oct 2011 23:01:41 +0000
List the features you'd want to see in a mechanism for identifying public wisdom. These requirements mean the mechanism would have to be internet based - i.e. a kind of national virtual forum. Such a forum would face a range of major challenges, but there's reason to think these could be handled.
Fri, 14 Oct 2011 22:10:35 +0000
We need the public wisdom because politically it would help governments make decisions; and on some issues would be the best guide to what the right decision would be. However we almost never know what the public wisdom is. Deliberative polling is our best current mechanism for finding out, but is too cumbersome and expensive to fully meet the need.
Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:26:08 +0000
Governments must make lots of decisions for Australia to make a smooth and timely transition to sustainability. Those decisions are constrained by public opinion; therefore we need to know what the public thinks. Standard opinion polls identify the public attitude, which falls far short of the public wisdom.
Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:35:02 +0000
The first time I saw someone using a Mac was a transfixing, transformative moment. It was 1987, and I’d just arrived at the UCL Ergonomics Unit. The only analogy I can make to the paradigm shift it felt like, was that this guy was doing the equivalent – it seemed at the time – of [...]
