Andraz Tori from Zemanta gave a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo about making it easier for people to create content, which made my ears perk up. Regular readers of this blog will know I’ve spent some time moaning about the interface we provide academics with to remix Open University course content in OpenLearn. So anything that can provide a nicer content creation environment is of interest – not just technically but in a way that appeals to the motivations of authors. Andraz said GUI is 80% – make creation of content easy.
Zemanta describes itself as a smart blog – as you write your blog posts it understands what you are writing about and offers you related links, photos and tags. This leads to opportunities for direct monetization (through affliate links), a better service for the author, ability to skip search and save time, and possibly more page views through trackbacks. The author’s noncreative workload is reduced, potentially motivating them to write more regularly and allowing them to concentrate on crafting their content. It also steers the author towards others discussing the same subject, helping them to become part of a community. The reblog feature (clipping other people’s blog posts to insert them inside your own) and efficient use of metadata leads to more chances for distribution and repurposing. Recommended interlinks to content found elsewhere of our own websites can also help with SEO. Real time updates on who else is writing about your subject while you write a post is great for staying topical and on top of commentary in any debate and can be filtered to include the key influencers in your field of interest. (I fear I would get easily distracted.)
The author can act as a filter for recommended content and metadata by compiling whitelists and blacklists. The system understands previous behavior and the data being dealt with to make random recommendations.
Some bloggers see 10-15% traffic increase from smart blogging.
Andraz gave some non-Zemanta examples and talked a little about “the next web” where computers will understand content and social context better. What if your computer understood what you were writing about, knew who you know and suggested content your community likes, for you to reference. What would your text editor look like? He quoted Marta Strickland on the idea that the next web is like a great party host, introducing people for meaningful conversation.
This raises interesting questions for remixing educational content intelligently and easily. If something like Zemanta could be used to guide you, making your remix better, easier, more enjoyable, more satisfactory and quicker to produce would more academics remix educational content? We already have some simple tools like the OER recommender that suggests links to related OER content.
I wonder also if this has implications for research – making it easier to reference the work of other academics? What about plagarism? And will smart blogging create more personalised content or limit differentiation between authors writing in an echo chamber of key influencers? Will it change who is listened to and written about but still result in an academic elite simply judged by a new set of metrics?
The Open University has just launched a Darwin website including links to free taster courses on Darwin, iTunesU podcasts, YouTube videos, a discussion forum and a Devolve Me game that let’s you upload a photo of yourself and see how you would have looked 3.7 million years ago, before moisturiser and mascara were invented. Here’s me, looking like I do most mornings.
Congrats to the Enabling Remote Activity team who won the Special Needs Innovation Award last night. The project provides opportunities for mobility impaired students to fully participate in fieldwork learning activities using mobile technologies. The best thing about winning the award was that the team got to meet Johnny Ball, my childhood hero.
The Handheld Learning conference is on over the next few days in London and has some fab speakers in the lineup (almost as fab as Johnny Ball) . Andrew Pinder, Chairman of Becta, Steven Berlin Johnson, Cultural critic & writer, Laurie O’Donnell, Director of Learning & Technology, Learning & Teaching Scotland, danah boyd, Social media scientist, Professor Stephen Heppell, Learning visionary, Keri Facer, Research Director, Futurelab, David Cavallo, Chief Learning Architect, Future of Learning Group, MIT Media Lab, Professor Mike Sharples, Director of LSRI and OU Chancellor, Lord David Puttnam.
Here’s a Friday afternoon ditty for you about The Open University. One of the comments on YouTube says “Who else could write a song about The Open University?”. Now there’s a challenge for you. Anyone fancy a songwriting competition via the OU YouTube channel?
Sadly MSG, the instant messenger on OpenLearn has died and will soon be buried. Please send flowers to the MSG project website. For more info read the news. Reasons for it’s demise are covered in The Open University journal, JIME but if you want to know the real reason, read about the adventures of its developer Alex Little.
The latest offering from the OUView Channel on YouTube.
And the science? Here the explanation:
Vast amounts of information are conveyed by our faces – not just speech, but also non verbal information – through our expressions. It’s also very important that we can tell the difference between people. Psychologists have suggested that our minds have, or learn, very specific abilities to process faces, their features and the information they convey. Now some of this ability is ‘tuned’ to work best on upright faces (not surprisingly as that’s the way we usually see them). So when a face is turned upside down some of these processes don’t work so well. This seems especially true of the ones that tell us about the spatial relationships between the main parts of the face – the mouth, eye and nose. So when the face is upside down – it’s as if these abilities get turned off and so we don’t spot the oddities.
We know that very specific bits of our brains do this job – because people with prosopagnosia (where part of the brain is damaged) can’t spot the difference between the upside down faces and the ones that are the right way up.
There’s been a LOT of discussion about academic quality vs user generated content, the role of the expert vs the power of many great minds thinking alike. So seeing some scientists rapping about a major science experiment has reignited the debate (at least among YouTubers). Is it a good way to engage the public in science (1,759,033 views on YouTube and counting) or is it dumbing down science? Should intellectuals make fools of themselves? Are we more interested in their work if they show us their human side? Or is it just concerning that our future could be in the hands of people with (shock, horror) a sense of humour? Surely mad scientists should stay in the comic books? I think the more serious you are, the more you can get away with it and the more interesting it will be to people – let’s face it the reputation of CERN scientists is not going to be doubted because they go a bit reality TV on us.
Whatever your opinion, there will always be one guy who thinks this is a waste of tax payers money (despite the fact they would have to pay a fortune to get this kind of attention through traditional advertising and part of the point of this is to encourage people to donate some of their computer’s downtime to process the data, so potentially saving money).
Some academics get nervous about the idea of ‘dumbing down’ to communicate what they do to the masses. The Open University create programmes with the BBC that are for the general public and not for our students, so the content has to be easily accessible. Some of our academics are more interested in the material that is cut out in the edit than the final programme. So do we see them turning to YouTube and Seesmic to get their academic ideas across in their own way? Some academics embrace technologies that allow them to get across ideas quickly and with great effect, even if they aren’t polished in production terms but it’s still early days.
Wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, microblogging, discussion forums, literacy over tools…
I’ve just seen Howard Rheingold’s vblog on the Social Media Classroom/ Co-Laboratory which is one to watch. There are so many social media/learning sites launching every week at the moment, but Howard isn’t bad at what he does IMHO so looking forward to having a tinker.
Yes, we have launched it: OUView. It’s been a bit of a hard graft these last few days but we have a site and some content. Just waiting for the friends, subscribers, comments, outrage from senior management, applause, fans and fame now. For those of you who want to get straight to it see: www.youtube.com/ou. Learning materials are at: www.youtube.com/oulearn. Community stuff is at: www.youtube.com/oulife (watch this space a bit more here as the idea of launching a community space is that our community get involved, but you do get some vblogs from OU folks talking about what they’ve learnt in YouTube and some Big Brother style student vblogs from the Graduation video booth.)
My favourite clip is still uploading as I type so here’s my second favourite.
To those who want a deep and full understanding of what we are doing, read on… or if you are OU staff check out the online services intranet site. Back last year sometime Cathy Casserly suggested we talk to Google/YouTube about getting a bit more professional with our YouTube presence. For the last year or so YouTube have been working with a number of universities to get educational video online. So (after checking a few strategy documents and rereading our mission statement to check we could have some legitimate fun) we got in touch and they gave us a free branded channel, because as Google always say making the web a more useful place is good for business.
And we are, to steal a Hirst phrase, very OUseful. Not only do we have a long standing relationship with the BBC making educational programmes, but we also create tons of video for our distance learning materials. Here’s a fact for you… At the OU library in Milton Keynes, the archive of scripts for the tens of thousands of OU course-related programmes ever made measures 92 metres, the length of a football pitch. On top of that our students and staff often use video conferencing to contact each other since they are all over the Uk and some in other parts of the world. So we’ve been fondly known for many years as the “University of the Air”. But then came the Interweb and IPTV, narrow casting, web streaming and power to the people producers… so new opportunities.
There are tons of video sites now from Seesmic for conversation, to Qik for live streaming and many like The Big Think and TED which have an educational focus. So why YouTube? Well it’s a good place to start – according to Nielsen NetRatings, YouTube is the 6th largest internet destination. So reaching more people and opening up access to education should be within our grasp.
Oh and if you have any suggestions for new straplines for the YouTube banner (where it says Watch and learn) please comment them here… we aim to change this regularly. Otherwise, visit us, add us, comment on us, subscribe to us and tell the world how ace we are. For me. Pretty please. I am tired and I want to go home.
FM, our browser based video conferencing facility has received a bit of attention recently since winning an award. We’ve now got an impact page which shows where the online meetings are being booked from every month, connecting people around the world.
So this is what use looked like in the month we launched, October 2006.
And this shows our world domination since! Ok so we’ve got some work still to do but it’s progress. This is the map from June 2008.
