“KWARC was!”

Presentation by Kostas Zafiropoulos (University of Marcedonia) at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008. Track: Government and Democracy for the Knowledge Society.

Study of blogs that contain posts linking to the sites of two political candidates. Grouping them based on their characteristics (pro candidate 1, non-political, ect.) and providing their number of incoming links (potentially a measure for their impact?). Computing the “closeness” of these groups: i.e. the percentage of links within a group. Computing the “interconnections” between different groups. Please see paper for details.

How scientific are blogs, as they are influenced by the subjective opinion of the blogger? Blogs offer a wide range of ideas, but the correctness and quality of these postings can not be assured.

Presentation by Luis-de-Macros (Unversidad de Alcalá) at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008. Track: Knowledge. Learning, Learning Technologies and E-Learning for the Knowledge Society.

All commercial e-learning initiatives follow the “learning object paradigm”, which encourages the creation of small reusable learning units, i.e. “learning objects (LO)”. These LO are aggregated and structured in order to create bigger learning units (lessons, courses). Currently most sequencing is done by an instructor, who creates general course material targeted to a general user rather than personalized sequences.

Competencies are defined as “multidimensional, comprised of knowledge, skills, and psychological factors that are brought together in complex behavioral responses to environmental cues (Wilkinson, A Matter of Life or Death: Re-engineering Competency-Based Education through the Use of a Multimedia CD-ROM). There are several initiatives to standardize the definitions of competences:

• IMS Reusable Definition of Competency or Educational Objective Specification
• IEEE Standard for Learning Technology—Data Model for Content to Learning Management System Communication
• HR-XML Consortium Competencies [Measurable Characteristics] Recommendations
• GEN/ ISSS European model of learner competencies

The author define competencies are outcomes of and perquisites for LO; creating constraints between LO (i.e. one LO has to precede a specific LO which provides the required competencies). Learning Object Metadata (LOM) records are used to attach the competencies to a LO.

From this LO sequence model, different sequences can be generated (the solution space of n LO is n!). Finding an appropriate LO sequence is seen as Constraints Satisfaction Problem. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is an evolutionary optimization algorithm (e.g. mimicing the behavior of social insects like bees). The author propose a PSO agent that performs automatic LO sequencing through competencies.

Keynotes by Robert D. Tennyson (University of Minnesota, psychologist) at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008.

Focus: Presentation of a learning theory developed with a German psychologist Klaus Breuer from University of Mainz.

Presentation by Peyman Nasirifard from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI, National University of Irland, Galway) at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008. Track: Social & Humanistic Computing for the Knowledge Society: Emerging Technologies and Systems for the Society and Humanity.

Focus: Using social annotation as means for giving access rights for collaborative information spaces. We already make use of annotation-based access management in real life. So let’s take it online. see Peyman Nasirifard website

Presentation by me at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008. Track: Social & Humanistic Computing for the Knowledge Society: Emerging Technologies and Systems for the Society and Humanity.

Our paper. Get the slides.

Presentation by Peter Geczy at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008. Track: Social & Humanistic Computing for the Knowledge Society: Emerging Technologies and Systems for the Society and Humanity.

Focus: Organization of Portals. Organizations have vast resources on their information systems. But are these resources used effectively? Lot of IT is purely created by IT people, leading to poor usability.

Presentation by Fabian Chatwin Cedrati (From one of three m31 companies: centervue) at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008. Track: Social & Humanistic Computing for the Knowledge Society: Emerging Technologies and Systems for the Society and Humanity.

There are problems with traditional forums: tons of categories but no real tagging; you have to know in advance where to post; but often discussion starts with one topic and naturally evolves towards some other argument (as in real life). We need to get rid of categories – aiming towards an (ontology-based) auto-tagging system. We need to get rid of trash (some scoring/ voting/ assessment mechanism to assure professional discussions)

Building on good ideas to build a solid and reliable tool: yahoo answer (a special interest threaded discussion), LinkedIn (social network of professionals). As the domain is restricted, the ontology is pre-build, i.e. it is limited to a fixed vocabulary (by the developers); actually it is not an ontology but a controlled vocabularly. But users are asked to add relations between the ontology-entries, i.e. to identify synonyms, similar words, and derivations.

• Tagging Approach: Extracting tags based on the ontology (no user-specific tags), weighing their frequency, weighing the specificity of words, and finally considering synonyms, similarities, and derivations. Each discussion thread has a dynamic tag cloud that changes with the discussion, So looking at the tags allows users to follow a discussion (quick overview).
• Scoring Approach: U-Tube style: rating a complete thread or a single post. They provide a 5-step rating (stars) and a voting (thumps up or thumps down). But what is rated? The quality/ helpfulness/ interest?
• Recommendation Approach: Recommendations are based on the profile of users (i.e. automated tagging allows to find similarities between posts of users).

Tools is free, but reserved to users in the eye care community (currently only in private beta). No open-source. Business plan focusses on licensing to other areas of the health care.

Presentation by Renato A.C. Capuruco (Western University of Ontario; work is part of his Ph.D.) at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008. Track: Social & Humanistic Computing for the Knowledge Society: Emerging Technologies and Systems for the Society and Humanity.

Many community websites have limited to none exploration and discovery capabilities to achieve societal gains and limited to none integrations to research streams. There must be a better way to do social computing (targeting towards a unified framework).

3 Models of the Framework

• Social Interaction
• Social Networks is a multidisciplinary field: Simmel (1902), Moreno (1930), Wellman (1977), Freeman (2004), Granovetter (1973) (Building a framework based on the work of psychologists and sociologists)
• Social Reputation: A reputation system is a system that “collects, distributes, and aggregates feedback about the participant’s past behaviors” (Resnick et al., 2000).

Decision Support (Community Database; Social Relation Assessment and Rating, Computing a Social Relation Index), and Constraints

A paradigm for Tagging-services in the knowledge society

Presentation by Michael Derntl (Research Lab for Educational Technologies, University of Vienna, Paderborn, Brno) at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008. Track: Social & Humanistic Computing for the Knowledge Society: Emerging Technologies and Systems for the Society and Humanity.

Structure: semantic data organization and tagging; inclusive social tagging, analysis of current Web2.0 services

Traditionally tags are words or phrases for organizing, searching, and finding objects. Social tagging and folksonomies are tags created by a community of users (in this sense folksonomy is the vocabularly used for a common set of resources). Display of social tags and folksonomy in tag clouds.

Universal accessibility: A product or service is universally accessible, if it can be used by persons regardless of their capabilities, skills, and characteristics. This includes high quality interaction, availability to anywere, anytime (mobile devices).

Inclusiveness: Universal accessibility + minimal technological preconditions. Generally, tagging seems more easily to create and use in contrast to e.g. metadata.

Message: “Inclusive Social Tagging is proposed as a theoretic, basic concept of social tagging in Web 2.0 to make it amenable to analysis, evaluation, and evolution based on issues relevant to today’s knowledge society”

Very nice talk, well-structured, not to abstract but not to detailed for the scope of the WSKS.

Apart from this work, the Research Lab for Educational Technologies aims at using technologies in education and analysis the respective effect. In particular, education shall move from the traditional forms to a more interactive experience. Interactivity in this sense refers to a human-2-human interaction, i.e. between students and tutor or between students in a learning communities. Here various technologies are used, such as forums, blogs, chats. The lab develops its own technologies for this purpose and evaluates its usefulness in university courses. However, making documents more interactive or facilitating interaction between humans and learning objects is not their focus (in contrast to the math education community who currently widely focusses on interactive mathematical tools such as GeoGebra, DME, ect.)

Panel discussion at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008. Track: Workshop Open Educational Resources.
Several international teachers and researchers, most of them familiar with Creative Commons licensing, gathered to discuss the state-of-the-art of open education.

• Method of collaboratively learning (learning in a social system) raised a debate on a paradigm shift from “individual learning model” (focus on acquisitions) to “collaboratively model” (participation process which leads to a social system in which learning might take place)
• Shift of the idea of a professor from “content provider” to “a teacher of practice, a navigator to open resources”: the added-value for students is not the content only, but the feedback on content, the instructions and discussions (see MIT initiative)
• Many institutions aim towards open access, but are challenged with many difficulties such as organizational changes (changing the infrastructure and view of a whole institution).
• What about very content-oriented providers (archives; long-distance universities)? Are they threatended to publish their material under open licenses?
• Should we introduced certificed usage of open material, so provides can earn credits/ reputations for good materials? Bibliometric study on textbooks (in spain), computing the impact factor for textbook. So quality is there; it is inscribed in the use of the materials. Also creative commons provide first bases of crediting: original authors can be cited, as e.g. lecturers are actually permitted to use their materials.
• OER Commons do not replace creative commons
• varying redundancies: very high for static content (mathematics, physiscs); rather than for dynamics. It’s about education and not about content.