Workshop on Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (RecSysTEL)

Deadline extended: July 1st

This year's continuation for our previous work on SIRTEL-workshops is a jointly organised workshop called RecSysTEL in conjunction with:

• 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2010)
• 5th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2010)

It takes place in Barcelona, Spain, 29-30 September 2010

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Joseph Konstan, GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota (USA)

AIM & TOPICS

Technology enhanced learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisations. It is an application domain that generally addresses all types of
technology research & development aiming to support of teaching and learning activities. Information retrieval is a pivotal activity in TEL, and the deployment of recommender systems has attracted increased interest during the past years.

Recommendation methods, techniques and systems open an interesting new approach to facilitate and support learning and teaching. There are plenty a resource available on the Web, both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners,
experts, tutors) that can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate systems that provide learners and teachers with meaningful guidance in order to help identify suitable learning resources from a potentially overwhelming variety of choices.

The aim of the Workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners that are working on topics related to the design, development and testing of recommender systems in educational
settings as well as present the current status of research in this area and create cross-disciplinary liaisons between the RecSys and EC-TEL communities. Overall, it aims to outline the rich potential of TEL as an application area for recommender systems, as well as expose participants to the challenges of developing such systems in a TEL context.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• User tasks to be supported by recommender systems in TEL
• Focus of recommendation in TEL
• Requirements for the deployment of TEL recommender systems
• Publicly available data sets for TEL recommender systems
• Recommendation algorithms and systems for TEL
• Transfer of successful algorithms and systems from other application areas
• Evaluation criteria and methods for TEL recommender systems

IMPORTANT DATES

• 20 June 2010: Submissions
• 16 July 2010: Notifications
• 1 August 2010: Camera-ready of accepted papers
• 29-30 September 2010: RecSysTEL Workshop in Barcelona

DATATEL CHALLENGE

Published datasets in recommender systems, such as the MovieLens and EachMovie ones, are very often used in experimental testing of new recommendation algorithms.
Very few datasets are publicly made available online for TEL applications.
Thus, it is not possible yet for TEL recommender systems' researchers to apply and benchmark their algorithms on existing, public datasets.

To this end, the dataTEL Theme Team of the European STELLAR Network of Excellence (http://www.teleurope.eu/pg/groups/9405/datatel/) is sponsoring the dataTEL Challenge: a call for TEL datasets that invites research groups to submit existing datasets from TEL applications that can be used as input for TEL recommender systems (e.g. ratings, tags, bookmarks).

The winner of the dataTEL Challenge will receive a best TEL dataset award.

More about the dataTEL Challenge:
http://www.teleurope.eu/pg/pages/view/9519/
http://adenu.ia.uned.es/workshops/recsystel2010/datatel.htm


SUBMISSIONS

The Workshop accepts a variety of submission types:

• Full papers: 12 pages
• Short papers: 6 pages
• System/service demos: 2 pages
• TEL Data sets: 2 pages and data set file (specs/format to be announced soon)

Papers should be original and not previously submitted to other venues.
Submission will be available through the EasyChair submission system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=recsystel2010

If you haven't an EasyChair account yet, you'll be asked to create it before you can access the RecSysTEL'10 page.


PUBLICATION

Workshop proceedings will be published in a seperate volume by a publisher
that will be announced soon.

In addition, authors of best full papers will be invited to submit a revised version
of their manuscripts for a Special Issue in a prestigious international journal
such as the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies.


STEERING COMMITTEE

• Jesus G. Boticario, aDeNu - Spanish National University for Distance Education (Spain)
• Peter Brusilovksy, University of Pittsburgh (USA)
• Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
• Denis Gillet, Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne (Switzerland)
• Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz (Austria)
• Peter Scott, Open University (UK)
• Riina Vuorikari, European Schoolnet (Belgium)
• Fridolin Wild, Open University (UK)
• Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT (Germany)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

• Liliana Ardissono, Universita di Torino (Italy)
• Katrin Borcea-Pfitzmann, Dresden University of Technology (Germany)
• Julien Broisin, IRIT Universite Paul Sabatier (France)
• Carlos Delgado Kloos, Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain)
• Stavros Demetriadis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece)
• Jon Dron, Athabasca University (Canada)
• Rosta Farzan, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
• Alexander Felfernig, Graz University of Technology (Austria)
• Rick D. Hangartner, Strands (USA)
• Eelco Herder, L3S (Germany)
• Tsukasa Hirashima, Hiroshima University (Japan)
• Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University (Germany)
• Martin Memmel, DFKI GmbH (Germany)
• Pedro J. MuÒoz-Merino, Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain)
• Brandon Muramatsu, MIT (USA)
• Wolfgang Nejdl - L3S & Leibniz Universit‰t Hannover (Germany)
• Xavier Ochoa, Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral (Ecuador)
• Mimi Recker, Utah State University (USA)
• Christoph Rensing, TU Darmstadt (Germany)
• Hans-Christian Schmitz, Fraunhofer FIT (Germany)
• Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala (Spain)
• Sergey Sosnovsky,DFKI GmbH (Germany)

CO-CHAIRS

• Nikos Manouselis, Greek Research & Technology Network (Greece)
• Hendrik Drachsler, Open Universiteit Nederlands (The Netherlands)
• Katrien Verbert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
• Olga C. Santos, aDeNu - Spanish National University for Distance Education (Spain)

ABOUT RecSys 2010 and EC-TEL 2010

The 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2010) is the premier annual event
on research and applications of recommender technologies. It will promote a close interaction
among practitioners and researchers, reaching a wider range of participants
including those from Europe and Asia. See http://recsys.acm.org/2010/ for details.


The 5th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2010) brings together technological developments, learning models, and implementations of new and innovative approaches to training and education. The conference traditionally explores how the synergy of multiple disciplines can provide new, more effective and more especially more sustainable, technology-enhanced learning solutions to learning problems. See http://www.ectel2010.org for details.

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What does it mean for a school to self-organise?

I was taken back to this initial idea, can schools self-organise?, after reading an article by Weston & Blain (2010) called "The end of techno-critique: the naked truth about 1:1 laptop initiatives and educational change". The reading of the article is of course related to my current work where we are running a large-scale 1:1 initiative in 6 European countries. At the end of the article, which I absolutely recommend reading, the authors conclude:

...1:1 initiatives can be fertile ground for the creation of new-paradigm schools, the schools that are self-organizing. The widespread availability of laptop computers can be a driver for the more expansive efforts that must happen in order for schools to meet the educational needs of all students....While the original mission of 1:1 laptop computer initiatives did not include shifting of educational paradigm, turning those initiatives toward the creation of self-organizing schools may be the the way forward for techno advocates and critics alike.

It's a lot about "change" in general, and especially the change that has to take place at the whole school level, not only by individual teachers, which still seem to be a trend when looking at the ICT implementations.

In our eTwinning, for example, we have more than 90 000 teachers signed up in Europe, which can be considered a good success (about 1.85% of all European teachers!). The naked truth comes out, though, when you look at the penetration by schools: about 75% of the schools have only one single teachers signed up in eTwinning, whose mission statement is "The community for schools in Europe". The community of schools build by single teachers who do not collaborate within their own schools?

So back to self-organisation - what would it mean for a school to self-organise? The hypothesis that I used for my PhD to study self-organisation within learning resource repositories was this:

The main hypothesis is that the self-organisation aspect of a social tagging system on a learning resource portal helps users discover learning resources more efficiently. Moreover, user-generated tags make the system, which operates in a multilingual context, more robust and flexible.

In this case, we could hypothesise:

The self-organisation aspect of a school helps learners learn more efficiently. Moreover, it makes the school more robust and flexible.

Bonabeau & Meyer (2001) use the following terms when talking about social insects and how they self-organise:

• Self-organisation (activities are neither centrally controlled nor locally supervised);
• Flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment);
• Robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks).

Adapted to a school, these would be interpreted as:

• Self-organisation (activities are neither centrally controlled nor locally supervised);
• Flexibility (the school can adapt to a changing environment);
• Robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the school can still perform its tasks).

Wow, that would be powerful, or what!?? Could 1:1 really ever help schools to self-organise? I guess this is one more reason to keep working hard on our 1:1 pilot. The next questions would be; how can a school self-organise? and what is required for a school to self-organise?

When I first started to think of this question, I was attending The Big Ideas Fest in California organised by ISKME. I was thinking of what would be A REALLY big idea for education. I think this is a pretty darn big one...

Is eTwinning socially contagious?

Last weekend I joined more than 500 eTwinners (www.etwinning.net) in the 5th annual conference that took place in Sevilla. Quite a fiesta! I co-ran 3 workshops which all had something to do with social networks, more or less. I jokingly tell teachers that I'd like them all get an eTwinning virus and spread it around when they go home. This "virus" is, of course, a good one (e.g. innovative use of web in ed.context) and it spreads through the social network that teachers have created by being part of eTwinning. From where my question: is, or can, eTwinning be socially contagious?

Often times nowadays when people talk about social networks, they actually talk about social media tools or web 2.0 stuff, where it is made easy to express your social ties and make them visible to others (can I friend you?). Underneath all that "stuff" lies the structure of the social network which is of interest to me. I consider a network

as a conduit for the propagation of information or the exertion of influence, and an individual's place in the overall pattern of relations determines what information that person has access to or, correspondingly, whom he or she is in a position to influence. A person's social role therefore depends not only on the groups to which he or she belongs but also on his or her position within those groups. (Watts, 2003, p. 48)

Moreover, Watts goes on to explain yet a different way to view the network, namely through weak ties, "which can be thought of as a link between individual- and group-level analysis in that they are created by individuals, but their presence affects the status and performance not just of the individual who "own" them but of the entire group to which they belong." - and this all leads to the new science of networks.

Duncan Watts's book Six Degrees (2003) is one of my favourite science-tainment (like edutainment) book. I always enjoy picking it up and re-reading it, I seem to understand some of the passages in a new light. Today I re-read the stuff about differences of spreading a virus and "social contagion", like a fab that spreads or cascades throughout the whole social network.

There are some similarities, like the fact that each individual has a different threshold (some get the virus easier than others) and that you have people around to spread it to ("to whom she or he pays attention to"). But "social contagion", unlike biological one, does not take place if the network is too well connected!

So when everyone is paying attention to many others, no single innovator, acting alone, can activate any one of them. ... In social contagion, remember, it is the relative number of "infected" versus "uninfected" - active versus inactive - neighbors that matter. (Watts, 2003, p. 240)

Studying fabs or innovations (e.g. the use of web in ed.context), the question is about the moment when the fab stops being a niche thing among early adapters and when it leaps to the larger general population. I too often have a feeling that eTwinning "preaches to the converted". So, I'm keen on understanding how eTwinning can step out of being a nice of early adapters and get the others "contaminated". Someone aired a good comment in the conference, we should not take eTwinners as a representative sample of educational community in general.

Step one: who is infected?


I ran a few analysis to get a better picture. It's hard to find the number of schools or teachers in all eTwinning countries. After some digging I found OECD's Stat extracts which has lots of good data, and was able to find the number of teaching staff for 23 out of 32 countries (close to OECD's definition for EU19). I think that's a pretty good proxy to go by, however, not sure how accurately our data aligns with them. I used the date as described in the image for 2007.

The data says there was 6 210 411.57 teachers (I love the 0.57 teacher!) working in those countries, out of which 76 367 have registered in eTwinning by this date. On average, each country has 1.83% of their teachers infected by the "eTwinning virus", median was 1.42%. The countries above median in descending order are: Estonia, Iceland, Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Finland, Greece, Poland (still above average, too!), Spain, Luxembourg, Portugal and Sweden. Are you surprised? I am a bit...

The countries below median were: the United Kingdom, Turkey, Norway, Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Hungary, Germany, France, Belgium and Austria.

Well, my question is not about the success of eTwinning initiative itself, but it's more about understanding what are the conditions (globally and locally), what are the individual thresholds and when can we expect the cascading effect to take place (it's all about one or more vulnerable neighbors who have one or more vulnerable neighbors who have...).

These are typical questions that people interested in the new science of networks ask, and I want to know more how it happens within educational context. I think eTwinning is a good virus to study that!

We've just stated the TeLLNet project with some top-notch partners, so I'm looking forward to dwell into this problematic later again!

From what are big educational ideas made?

Silicon valley is an iconic example when people talk about innovation. To breed innovation, it's important to remember that it's not only about individuals with ideas, but about the right conditions, like a "large number of cutting-edge entrepreneurs, engineers and venture capitalists" (wikipedia), in the case of the Valley. On top of that, you add a flavour of Californian sea, sun and wine, and you season it with a bit of pioneering attitude, and voila!

I'm today in California for theBig Ideas Fest.

The three-day Big Ideas Fest is an immersion into collaboration and design with the focus on inspiring and modeling cutting-edge thinking in K-20 education.

The programme and the names of speakers are pretty impressive! I think there will be an interesting buzz in the air, as the event brings together cutting-edge educationalists, "doers and shakers" who are interested in brainstorming on big ideas that are needed to move education in the right direction. The session is starting in a few seconds, so I'll be reporting back later.

My degree of Doctor at Open Universiteit Nederland

"..you hereby receive all rights associated with the degree of Doctor either by law or custom"

My Doctorate Board and me with the degree and a huge smile - what a day!

From left Prof. dr. G. Conole, Prof. dr. A. Littlejohn, Prof. dr. B. Berendt , me, Prof. dr. P.B. Sloep, Prof. dr. E.J.R. Koper (supervisor), Prof. dr. J. van Marle (chairman) and Beadle E. Vinken. And no, even if I'm a doctor now, I don't get to wear a funny hat!

I thank everyone involved in my research and all who sent me kind wishes and congratulations!

my 10 minutes of fame

View more presentations from Riina Vuorikari.

Slides and PhD download

Future privacy and security resaerch challenges in online social networks

I attended this workshop a couple of days ago. It was an interesting mix of ppl with different backgrounds; computer scientists, researchers, lawyers, some practitioners & users like a SN provider, some artists who run social network services, and my interest was of course teachers' social network services like our eTwinning platform (more than 70000 teachers).

I enjoyed the keynote by Ronald Leenes from Tilburg University. A few projects that he mentioned, PrimeLife (Bringing sustainable privacy and identity management to future networks and services) and BROAD (Broadening the Range Of Awareness in Data protection).

EUN is now running a http://www.dataprotectionday.eu/ campaign, here is my favourite film about it!

Most scholarly opponent - PhD Ceremony in OUNL Nov 13 2009

It's pretty exiting to prepare for the PhD ceremony. There are all kinds of little things to think about. I've never gotten married, but it sure sounds like the same thing. In the Netherlands, for example, we need to have paranymphs at the PhD ceremony.

Yes, I know, it sounds like I need to have two dwarfs by my side there, but apparently they are like a bride's maid or a best man. With a twist that in case there was a heated fight between me and the opponents during the defence, the paranymphs would defend me with swords. Or, you know, something similar. So far, all what I've seen is that they hand over a class of water, but - we've ain't seen nothing yet..

Another thing is the manner of speech, I am, for example, to address the members in my committee by saying "most scholarly opponent", if they are a professor, otherwise just "scholarly opponent" is fine. And they call me "esteemed candidate". Pretty theatrical :)

Finally, I needed to prepare 10 statements in advance, they are called stellingen. 4 of them are about my thesis and the rest are more general (some can even be a bit funny, see #10). But in general, they all should be something that I can defend.

The purpose of this is that when the opponent has not had time to read my thesis and come up with a question, they can read one from the list. This way they can have a well formulated question to ask. My advantage - I can prepare for it in advance. Kind of a funny game! It seems to me that the more bold the statement is, the better chances there are that one of the opponents reads it out loud. Let's see...

1. A learning resource portal in a multilingual context can be made more robust and flexible by interrelating conventional metadata and social tags. (this thesis)

2. Socal tags, represented as a triple (user,item,tag), open more sophisticated avenues for resource discovery across contexts, especially when it applies to cross-language and cross-country discoveries. (this thesis)

3. The triple (user,item,tag) can be used as a parameter to measure links between cross-language content that reside on heterogeneous repositories. It can be created a posteriori to content creation and link-setting, and it can be used to support and enhance a new type of link-following behaviour by end-users. (this thesis)

4. The discovery strategies based on Social Information Retrieval (SIR) methods allow users to spend less effort in finding relevant resources on a multilingual portal. (this thesis)

5. The notion of learning resources as content is too limiting.

6. Even if the current trend in information seeking behaviour is the Web, interpersonal ties still drive and support information seeking. Social search should be considered beyond individual’s Web-behaviour.

7. While studying the impact of new information and communication technologies on education and attainment, studying their out-of-school use should be considered as important as their in-school use.

8. In Technology-Enhanced Learning, like in other lo-fi high tech, the next best thing is “good ‘nuf” for most users.

9. Languages both unite and divide people.

10. Anyone involved in decision-making for educational purposes should read science fiction.

Educational take - danah boyd: American Teens & Social Media

danah boyd has put something really important in words in this little video, it's related to the use of social media (applicable to all ICTs and mobile technologies) in education. If in a hurry, fast-forward to about 5.30 of the video:

Teens need to know boundaries, norms and how society works, and this should be taught through using social media, i.e. the tools that they use anyway .

The reason that "because kids are doing it" it not a good reason to start teaching about social media in schools. "Pedagogy and understanding of the tools, are two key pieces of knowledge that teachers must have before entertaining the idea of bringing social media into the classroom. Information sharing is relevant to education..."

A valid point made for teachers continuous professional development!

Invitation to the public defence of my PhD

Hurrah, finally the day when I can announce the public defence of my PhD: Nov 13 2009 at 13.30. You are welcome to join the public defence of my PhD at the OUNL premises in Heerlen, NL!

Today I also submitted my manuscript to print. Here you can see the cover of the publication, which is also downloadable here.

Run of the day:
13.30 Public defence in OUNL
15.00 Reception (all welcome, RSVP)
19.30 Dinner in Brussels (RSVP)

Impact of ICT use on educational performance

The question the top-dog politicians nowadays ask is the impact of ICT on educational performance. Especially in the school sector, this has been the trendy question since a few years, when the policy makers realised that they want to see some return on their investment (i.e. all the hardware put in schools). My favourite EUN report on recent research is The ICT Impact Report (01/2007).

This week at the OECD's New Millennium Learner conference South-Koreans presented another interesting study towards this direction. Prof. Heo's presentation is available here, check the pages from 20 onwards for the results. The study included 10% of the 10th graders in South-Korea (1071 students, random sampling). The design of the study looked at the use of ICT

• Place: in-school and out-of-school use of ICT
• Purpose: learning vs. entertainment use of ICT
• Context: individual use vs. social use of ICT

Educational performance was divided into:

• Cognitive domain
• Affective domain
• Socio-cultural domain
  

Significant impact was found on educational performance with:

• Out-of school ICT use
  
• ICT use for learning
  
• ICT use in individual context

Note, in-school use did not yield any significant impact :/ More interestingly, out-of-school use of ICT for learning purposes had a positive correlation (r=0.520, p= 0.00) with cognitive domain of educational performance, which shows good news for informal context of learning.

Mindmap from Social Information Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning workshop

Best Paper Award in ICWL'09

The paper that I presented in ICWL'09, Are tags from Mars and descriptors from Venus? A study on the ecology of educational resource metadata, was awarded the Best Paper Award. That was pretty dam cool! The picture below shows how psyched I was to pick up the award at the gala dinner. You'll find the paper from here and a news release from here.

The picture is by Kevin Chen from RWTH, Aachen.

Ok, this is an inside joke: I've named the pic "la vengeance se mange très-bien froide", for those who know the story, you guessed that the timing of this award could not have been better! Thanks for the co-authors and the jury :)

Obama's OER vs. EU's OER

Checking the news about Obama's announced initiative where a $500-million-dollar online-education plan is outlined with the idea that the money will buy online course material that is made freely available. The person who is pushing the plan within the administration, Mr. Smith, has previously worked with OER in Hewlett Foundation, which has put some $ 70 million in last years to support Open Educational Resources worldwide.

EU has put huge amounts on different research and development progremmes around digital educational resources since late nineteens, and especially under Lisbon 2010 agenda. I checked some figures just for recent times:

• FP7 progrmamme for '09-'10 has €151 million euros for digital libraries and TEL
• LPP puts € 7 billion for the programme from '07 to '13, more than a billion a year
• eContent Plus has significant budgets also
  

The big difference is that the EU seldom actually puts money in developing the content, but actually innovation and services around the content. I think the reasoning is that the content comes from publishers and more and more from end-users, and they do not want to rock that boat too much. I actually cannot think of a single EU-project where the content creation is paid by EU. For example the big OUUK initiative was also funded by Hewlett Foundations, which nowadays gets the world-wide claim to OER fame.

This setting could offer an interesting comparison study in a few years time: do we see more uptake with content that is professionally developed and made available to educators and learners (i.e. Obama's model), or do we see that the EU model, where the focus is on services, but the content is not always up to par, (finally) produces some uptake?

I wanted to find the journal article mentioned in the post, but could not

In January he published an article in the journal Sciencelaying out the dream of "a 21st-century library" composed of Web-based open courses for high-school and college students. The courses would be laced with multimedia features and personalized with feedback from computer programs that track student performance. The language coming out of the White House and Education Department today echoes some of the concepts in Mr. Smith's article.

Social media: narcissism, ADHA, stalking

This is a pretty accurate depiction of the what goes on with the users of social media. It makes a good-looking t-shirt!

Personalisation vs. Social

I've been thinking of this personalisation-thing a lot lately. I quite cannot get my head around it, so this blog post is just to mull over the ideas.

By personalisation it is meant that, for example on a learning resource portal, the offer is tailor made for one of the users of the system. There are three commonly known ways of doing this:

1. Based on self-proclaimed profile (e.g. you say you teach math, so your services are personlised towards math)
   
2. Based on collaborative filtering e.g. ratings (like-minded users, ppl who agree in the past tend to agree in the future) or content-based filtering
   
3. Based on behaviour (e.g. other teachers who used this resource, also used xx)
   

In the cases 1 and 2, the idea is that there is a profile for you, whereas no: 3 can be used for any user (e.g. this is what Amazon does for any user regardless if they are logged in or not). With the first two cases, we can state that this type of personalisation is often cumbersome and labour-intensive, the problem is how to get that information from users (which creates cold start problem for users, and is also related to cold start problem of resources).

Also, not all the users are always interested in doing the work of filling in a profile or rating resources. In one of my studies (Vuorikari, Sillaots, Panzavolta, Koper, 2009) we found very different types of users behaviour, in this case related to how ppl tag (which could be also used for collaborative filtering).

About 33% of ppl tagged content (the arrows going away from the user group in the image), 32% used tags for searching but did not tag themselves (the arrows going towards a user), whereas 35% of ppl did not tag nor used tags at all (in the image the arrow going from LOM towards the group indicating that they used LOM based search methods only).

In this case, I'm interested in the 32% group, who clearly got benefit from tagging that other folks did, but did not do any work themselves (kinda freeriders, if you wish, but I don't mean to be negative).

If we were to use the tagging and bookmarking information to construct a user profile of the users and further use it for personalisation (no: 1 and 2 in the list above), we would be only able to do it for the group of taggers, i.e. 33%. The benefits could only be reaped by that group too, since for the rest of them, we have no profiling information to be used for personalisation.

However, a social tagging system is more about creating "personalisation" for all the users of the system, regardless if we know anything about them and they are willing to put in the time to create a profile and feed it in. It's about making social navigation trails visible to every user of the system, instead of going for "personalisation".

What I think is really cool is that we've shown that we more than doubled the amount of ppl who took advantage of contributions, i.e. from 27% who tag and use tags for navigation to 59% (that is adding the group of 32% who use tags but don't tag).

My assumption is that the rest would not even care about recommendations, etc., as they seem to formulate their searches in a rather acknowledgble way (40% formulate advanced searches; 38% only browse categories and 30% do both).

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Some other thoughts about personalisation:

• There are things that I dig, like Amazon, when it tells me "ppl who bought this book also bought xx". Thing thing is, though, that is the stuff that generally makes any user's life better on Amazon. It is not that they personalise the thing for me only, the unique Riina, the one and only, but it is something that makes any users experience on Amazon better.
  
  
• the problem with personalisation often is that there needs to be a detailed profile of you that is based on detailed user model that is based on some abstract model that some obscure committee came out with in the 70's. Ok, that's maybe a bit exaggerated, but you get the point - there is a model where you are fitted.
  
  
• What if I don't want to be personalised? What if I want to do the same thing as my buddies do; listen to same music as they do, study the same stuff as they do and go shopping with them? I want to share my life and experiences with other people around me because, guess what, through that type of sharing and doing stuff together, I feel related to them, I have things to talk with them and we form a community together. And it is really important for me to be part of that community, because it's part of who I am and helps me to reflect on what's out there.
  
  
• Is peronalisation really personalised? It's not actually. By making things personalised to me, what is actually happening is "un-personlisation" of me. My taste is guided to the direction of all the other users, so I am actually being socialised! My personal music recommendations are actually very similar to other listeners, and eventually, it's all going to be the same taste!! Of course, unless there is randomness which offers serendipity.
  
  
• Lately with all these micro-messaging things where ppl post their "mood" or what they are doing online ( e.g. I should be tweeting right now: "I'm writing a blog post" and simultaneously have it up on my Facebook), it's kinda funny that they feel this urge to yell out to all what they are doing in their über-personlised world.
  

Palm Pre - I wonder when it might come to Europe?

Already for a long time I've been ready to say goodbye for Nokia. This is a big statement from someone from Finland whose grown up with Nokia. Mind you, when you kid/growing up you wear Nokia rubber boots. Your bike tires are Nokia. I bet at one point there was also toilet paper that they produced, among other things like cable and TVs. And then - the first kännys, the mobile phones in early 90' (Btw, they were not called gsms back in the day, as we used anotehr standard called NMT with much better coverage in vaste areas like in Lapland).

So, my whole active mobile phone user time (which in my case started already in early 80's, dad had a mobile phone in the car which we used to tell mom to turn on sauna when returning from summer house. You actually had to go by a dispatcher and push to talk!) I've stayed fidel to Nokia, and mostly Communicator, which I have had since '03 or something (when they came up with the 2 model).

Anyway, everything turned sour with the last Communicator that I had (E something). They've cut down the awsome shortcuts that used to be there and everything became too heavey and hard to use. Also, the size did not get any smaller. But I did not want to buy an iPhone either, I think no cool kids use iPhone. All the other phones are infested with all Microsoft this and that from which I prefer to shun away. So when I heard about Pre Palm, I took a look at it with no presumptions of the past (I used to hate palms and despite ppl who choose to use such an inferior technology - go and figure)

I so want it, this review is really good. I wonder if I have to wait until they come to Europe or can I buy it from the US? Well, actually just checked on it, by Christmas - geee, that's some waiting.

Google parsing microformat, e.g. ratings

In May Google announced that they will start parsing microformats (on a small scale first), similar stuff came out from Yahoo! last year, but even on a smaller scale.

This is pretty huge for the end-user generated ratings! I must say that I did not see it coming in this way, which makes it even more exiting :)

..Google is releasing support for parsing and display of microformat data in their search results. .. anyone who marks their pages up with the appropriate microformat data will be able to make their information understandable by Google. This technology would allow you to explicitly search, for example, for only printers that had an average customer review of 3 stars or higher.

Holy smokes! This is cool, can't wait to see when it will first pop up in my search :)

So, since a long time it's been problematic to get enough ratings on items, this is a known problem especially in the field of Recommender systems. They talk about "sparse data". An example, you want to make a recommendation on music, but the item x has 3 ratings, item y 2 ratings, etc. This is way too little to be used to create recommendations using the algorithms that are out there. Take another example, a camera shop, they let users rate their cameras, but they get very little reviews from users.

Now, however, there are other camera shops who are struggling with the same problem. Essentially, they all are selling the same camera brands, and they all have only a few ratings on it, and at the end, non of them can do much fun with this small amount of rather anecdotal information.

There has been talk about a unique identifier set by industry, for example, so that all camera sellers could use them and thus aggregate all the reviews and ratings together. Yep, you guessed it, there's maybe that one shop down the blog who does not want to use it. I think a couple of years back Yahoo! came up with a very compelling paper reiterating the idea and trying to muster up enough consensus among industry and other players. Not much happened - and then, here is Google and microformats... beautiful :)

Why I'm interested in this is that with the idea of federating learning resource metadata across repositories, we face the same problem. As a result of sharing metadata, the same resource might end up used in many different repositories, where users might be allowed to rate them. But that metadata on ratings or evaluations is VERY seldom shipped back to the mother board.

The same with tags and bookmarking (other other tools that allow users to create collections or playlists). That could be valuable information for the repository who first federated the resource metadata out. By collecting back the varied annotations from different repositories, they could gain interesting information, and eventually overpass the sparse data problem. Moreover, they would gain data about what works and in which context, which makes me think of "travel well" resources.

In action

Here is an example of a search for Palm's new phone that I'm contemplating on. I search for reviews only and the result list shows the ratings, but I cannot yet make a query saying "palm pre" ratings grater than 3. Nice in any case.




I've had a few ideas on this with some colleagues and I really look forward to seeing what Google comes up with that. And how are they going to solve the issue of different rating scales used, and multi-attribute ratings.

Vuorikari, R., Manouselis, N., & Duval, E. (2007). Metadata for social recommendations: storing, sharing and reusing evaluations of learning resources. In D. H. Goh & S. Foo (Eds.), Social Information Retrieval Systems: Emerging Technologies and Applications for Searching the Web Effectively (pp. 87-107). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Inc. Retrieved from http://elgg.ou.nl/rvu/files/20/144/SIR_vuorikari_manouselis_duval_web.pdf.

Manouselis, N., & Vuorikari, R. (2009). What if annotations were reusable: a preliminary discussion. In M. Spaniol (Ed.), Advances in Web-Based Learning - ICWL 2009, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 5686, pp. 255–264). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.

Tags and self-organisation: a metadata ecology for learning resources in a multilingual context

I think I finally came up with a title for my PhD. You know, the type of title that says it all. It's a bit long, but "correct and descriptive", like Matt said. So here it goes: Tags and self-organisation: a metadata ecology for learning resources in a multilingual context.

Here is a wordle, it was extracted from a paper that summaries the research. Looks pretty accurate :)

Study on contexts in tracking usage and attention metadata in multilingual Technology Enhanced Learning

Just submitted the final version of the paper to a workshop on Exploitation of Usage and Attention Metadata (EUAM 09). Here is a one-pager about it and the link to the paper.

Study on contexts in tracking usage and attention metadata in multilingual Technology Enhanced Learning

“Context” is widely accepted to be important for correctly interpreting user input and for improving predictive and possibly also diagnostic models. But what is context, and how can it be measured? By measuring we mean to operationalise the construct and data gathering to provide values for the desired variables.

In this study, we consider the intersection of the areas of digital learning resource repositories, digital libraries and social tagging systems where users from a variety of countries use technology enhanced learning (TEL) offerings in a variety of languages. We consider usage and attention metadata as an example of the wider notion of context adapting the definition of context as “any information that can be used to characterise the situation of entities” [Dey01]. We give an overview of dimensions of context that are relevant in TEL, specifically arguing that context comprises the usage situation and environment as well as persistent and transient properties of the user. Therefore, distinguishing between the macro-context and the micro-context of TEL is useful.

TEL and the analysis of the data it generates take place in different types of educational settings which we call the macro-context of TEL. We use the term micro-context to denote the context that is relevant for interpreting a specific user input and for designing adequate system responses and other output. The micro-context is subdivided into user models, material/environment models, interaction models, and background knowledge, showing that usage and attention metadata are of different types and play different roles for learning about context.

We then concentrate on teachers using learning-resource repositories as an important use-case example of TEL and focus on language and country as context variables. We describe different ways in which these variables are operationalised, and we outline ways in which TEL use such context information to improve the use and reuse of repositories by supporting users in a multilingual and multicultural context. A key theme of our article is the central role that social tagging can play in this process: on the one hand, tags describe usage, attention, and other aspects of context, on the other, they can help to exploit context data towards making repositories more useful, and thus enhance the reuse.

Riina Vuorikari 1,2, Bettina Berendt3
1 European Schoolnet, Brussels, Belgium,
2 OUNL, Heerlen, Netherlands,
3 KU Leuven, Belgium

My tag paper nominated for best paper award 2009

I'm pretty exited that one of my papers for ICWL 09 was among the 5 best paper nominees. For a some time now I've been wondering what does it take to write a paper that arises above the general mass of papers. Well, now I have a bit better idea :)

What does it take? Reading tons of research papers, write a few (un)successful ones to practice, a good inspiring topic, some research work with ppl who are truly interested in what they are doing, and voila!

I also like how Celstec, OUNL (where I study), picked it up for their news feed. I think that over all, they have a pretty neat way to recognise what's going on and make others aware of it too. A modest person as I am, I would never make any fuss about it.... right.. ;)

Wiley calls it “dirty secret” of OER

Just picked up a fresh PhD study by S. M. Duncan from USU, a student of D.Wiley's. The study is called Patterns of Learning Object Reuse in the Connexions Repository. The punch line is that there is very little reuse of LOs among the repository studied.

What new? Similar findings have been discovered here in Europe (end elsewhere) for a while now. Ochoa (2008), for example, found in his PhD dissertation that reuse in general remains low, about 20%, across all sizes of collections. This was interesting not only for how low the reuse is (20%, common!), but also because since forever folks have been saying that resources with smaller granularity are more reusable, as they lack context, etc (insert here the infamous graph of "modular content hierarchy", the most used LO). Well, according to Ochoa (2008), this was not the case.

I also looked at the reuse on 2 different platforms: LeMill and Calibrate from European Schoolnet. My twist was to study the cross-boundary use and reuse, i.e. teachers reusing learning resources that are in a language other than their mother tongue and originate from different countries than they do. I used the same reuse definition as Ochoa (2008), which basically is the same as in Duncan's study.

The finding was that the general reuse was around 20%, but NOT across all collections. For example, in LeMill, "Multimedia material" was used more often, but in Calibrate, the smaller granularity was seldom added to Collections. The cross-boundary reuse was notably less (37% to 55% of it). Moreover, in some of the collections only around 10% of resources were ever added to a collections, which makes you really think hard about the efficiency of this all..

Anyway, the good news in Duncan's study is this:

There was a common author in 3,722 module uses, while there were only 1,013 module uses where there was no common author. This means that modules were included in collections 3.67 times more often when there was at least one person in common with both the module and the collection.p.32

So if people know each other, they are more likely to reuse material from each other! This shows that social is important when we are talking about the use and reuse of learning resources! This is similar to what I am saying in my PhD thesis, which hopefully will come out one day soon. My twist of course is that tags can make those social connections between people, and by taking advantage of these underlying social connections, we can make the learning resource discovery much better - and hopefully also more useful for teachers.

Vuorikari, R., Koper, R. Evidence of cross-boundary use and reuse of digital educational resources. Link to a revised version of the paper, not reviewed yet!

Testing LeMill for embedding content

LeMill is one of my favourite tools to create online material. It's so simple and easy to use. What I like a lot is that they always follow their time, like here I'm testing how the embedding of my content happens in another platform.

Here is one "Collection" that I've created called "hansin kamaa" = stuff from Hans. It includes two different pieces of content. Apart from exporting the content as a zip-file, I can now also just embed it somewhere, for example in my blog. Pretty neat - and useful!



Testing something else here:

ICT Call 5 info days: European Schoolnet

I'm attending Call 5 infodays tomorrow for European Schoolnet. Here are a few things that we've been working with lately that could be relevant. The speakers look interesting, check them here.

For Large data sets:

• eTwinning schools: more than 60 000 teachers have signed up. Stats available here. Now with eTwinning 2.0, new data will be available for new types of "connections" and "links" that teachers have.

• This work is an example: eTwinning Network visualisation tool was created in collaboration with RWTH

• Social Bookmarking data by teachers on learning resources residing on a number of different learning resource repositories in Europe. Some ManyEyes visualisation available to see different types of "connections" or "links" created.
  

Personal sphere

• Would be interesting to study how is the personal sphere of a teachers in these days!

Some related slideshows:

• Open Educational resources and tags creating connections
  

• Networking learning communities: Open Educational Resources Start from page 16 onwards.
  
• Social networks and networking to support eTwinning teachers
  

SIRTEL'09: 3rd Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning

Paper Submission by June 14, 2009
in the International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL) 2009
Aachen, Germany, August 21, 2009
http://celstec.org/sirtel

IMPORTANT DATES

Contribution Submission: June 14, 2009
Results Notification: July 13, 2009
Camera Ready Submission: July 31, 2009
Workshop date: August 21, 2009

CALL FOR WORKSHOP CONTRIBUTIONS

We are delighted to welcome exciting new contributions for the 3rd SIRTEL workshop
- Research papers
- System Demos
- Hands-On proposals
- Abstracts for "Pecha Kucha"


RATIONALE

Learning and teaching resource are available on the Web - both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors). They can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The remaining challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate Social information retrieval (SIR) methods, techniques and systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance in potentially overwhelming variety of choices.

The aim of the SIRTEL’09 workshop is to look onward beyond recent achievements to discuss specific topics, emerging research issues, new trends and endeavors in SIR for TEL. The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to present, and more importantly, to discuss the current status of research in SIR and TEL and its implications for science and teaching.

The proceedings from the last years:
· SIRTEL'07 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-307
· SIRTEL'08 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-382


TOPICS OF INTEREST (but not limited to):

• Recommender systems and collaborative filtering in educational settings
• Defining the scope, purpose and objects of social information retrieval in TEL
• Novel ways of generating input for recommenders (explicit and implicit methods)
• Ranking of search results to support individualised learning needs
• Integrating SIR services in existing educational platforms
• Folksonomies, tagging and other collaboration-based information retrieval systems
• Social navigation processes and metaphors for searching information related to teaching and learning
• Social networks and interactions in learning communities to facilitate information sharing and retrieval
• Approaches to TEL metadata reflecting social ties and collaborative experiences in the field of education
• Pedagogic decisions, recommender systems and how to contextualise recommender system to support learning processes.
• Interoperability of SIR systems for TEL
• Visualisation techniques in learning and teaching
• Semantic annotation and tagging for social information retrieval purposes
• Evaluating the performance of SIR systems in educational applications
• Measuring the effectiveness of SIR systems in supporting learning and teaching
• Evaluation the user satisfaction with SIR systems in supporting learning and teaching

WORKSHOP SUBMISSIONS

The workshop invites several types of contributions which allow a wide level of participation:
· Research papers (upto 8 pages)
· System Demos (upto 2 pages)
· Hands-On proposals (1-pager)
· Abstract for Pecha Kucha (1-pager)

The workshop proceedings will be published as CEUR Workshop Proceedings online at http://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/. Copy rights will be reserved.

Please use the same template as the one for the main conference with details at http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/submission.html. Workshop paper length is not limited.

All questions and submissions should be sent to: sirtelworkshop@gmail.com

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

• Alexander Felfernig, Graz University of Technology, Austria
• Brandon Muramatsu, MIT, USA
• Frans van Assche, European Schoolnet, Belgium
• John Dron, Athabasca University, Canada
• Lloyd Rutledge, OUNL, The Netherlands
• Markus Strohmaier, Graz University of Technology, Austria
• Markus Weimer, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
• Martin Wolpers, Fraonhofer-Institut, Germany
• Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala, Spain
• Olga Santos, UNED, Spain
• Rick D. Hangartner, MyStrands,USA
• Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Styliani Kleanthous, University of Leeds, UK
• Tiffany Tang, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China
• Wolfgang Reinhardt, University of Paderborn, Germany
• Xavier Ochoa, Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral, Ecuador
• Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Zinayida Petrushyna, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

ORGANISERS

* Riina Vuorikari, European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium and CELSTEC, OUNL, Netherland
* Hendrik Drachsler, CELSTEC, OUNL,The Netherlands
* Nikos Manouselis, Greek Research & Technology Network
* Rob Koper, CELSTEC, OUNL, The Netherlands


ABOUT ICWL 2009

ICWL is an annual international conference on web-based learning. Since the first ICWL was held in Hong Kong in 2002, it has been held in Australia (2003), China (2004), Hong Kong (2005), Malaysia (2006), United Kingdom (2007), and China (2008). The 8th ICWL 2009 will be held in Aachen, Germany, a city with rich culture, high-tech research, and a truly European spirit. ICWL 2009 will be jointly organized by Hong Kong Web Society, RWTH Aachen University, and Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science.
TAG THIS

Feel free to blog about this and social bookmark the call! Use the tag "sirtel09".
*************************************************************

Challenges and lessons learned from Social tagging in MELT

Social tagging in MELT, how do we want to take the social tagging work forward

Social tagging of educational resources potentially offers new ways for:

Individuals to
1.1) better manage their digital learning resources that reside in different repositories and platforms, and

1.2) discover and access new resources from different contexts (e.g. different language, educational system) through tags and other users.

LOR managers to
2.1) get third party metadata on learning resources (either the ones that already reside on their repository, or the possible new ones to be added to collections,

2.2) create affinities (e.g. link structure) between separate pieces of resources (either on their own repository, or the ones that reside on other repositories on the federation or on the Web) that were not cross-referenced before.

In the MELT project so far, we have only been able to see the peak of these potentials emerging. We list issues that we see important for future work in the field, for the clarity, we only list one of the main issues for each topic:

• 1.1 To fully support users in their knowledge management task on digital learning resources, the bookmarks (including title, url and tags) should be exportable in standard Webfeed formats. This would allow users to access and manage their MELT resources as part of their other resources collections, whereas now users need to be logged on to the MELT portal to do this.
  
  
• 1.2 Pivotal browsing of social bookmarks takes advantage of the affinities between the user, resource and tags. In the MELT context, more metadata could also be added to support pivotal browsing, such as the country of the user, interest topics; resource metadata such as multilingual indexing keywords. This would allow novel ways to access resources that other users have already discovered within the federation, and thus build on users’ social interactions and co-construction of knowledge.
  
  
• 2.1 Tags by end-users on the MELT portal have been shown to be of good quality as additional metadata descriptors of resources. We have enumerated possibilities of metadata ecology that the use of multilingual Thesaurus can offer to a federation such as LRE. Apart from working on ways to automatically generate LOM from tags, we urge on using the hierarchical structure and multilingual features to leverage user-generated tags.
  
  
• 2.2 Why not do Google for learning resources? Using PageRank-like algorithms on a learning resource repository or federation has been impossible for a number of reasons, the most important is the lack of a link-structure that cross-references resources. Tags, creating underlying connections between seemingly random pieces of content in different languages, on repositories in different countries and other platforms on the Web, rely on humans’ subjective idea of its importance for a given information seeking task. Using this new, emerging link-structure with tags as “anchor texts” offers totally new ways to “organise the world's learning resources and make them universally accessible and useful”. A new tag line could be “From teachers to teachers”.

Link structure and anchor text

I read that Brin & Page (1998) paper again. A few guidelines to keep in mind:

..our notion of "relevant" to only include the very best documents since there may be tens of thousands of slightly relevant documents. This very high precision is important even at the expense of recall (the total number of relevant documents the system is able to return).

Two features to produce high quality precision:

• Link structure is used to create objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance. Well, it's that simple..
  
  
• Anchor text:
  

  ..anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves. Second, anchors may exist for documents which cannot be indexed by a text-based search engine, such as images, programs,..

The point about the anchor text is so interesting, I wonder how well does it apply to tags? I bet really well..

I also found this interesting: "it has location information for all hits and so it makes extensive use of proximity in search"

Differences Between the Web and Well Controlled Collections

• extreme variation internal to the documents: documents differ internally in their language (both human and programming), vocabulary (email addresses, links, zip codes, phone numbers, product numbers), type or format (text, HTML, PDF, images, sounds), and may even be machine generated (log files or out putfrom a database).
  
• external meta information as information that can be inferred about a document, but is not contained within it. Examples of external meta information include things like reputation of the source, update frequency, quality, popularity or usage, and citations. Not only are the possible sources of external meta information varied, but the things that are being measuredvary many orders of magnitude as well.
  

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3208417/The-Anatomy-of-a-LargeScale-Hypertextual-Web-Search-Engine

Cross-language use of the Web; users behaviours and attitudes

Berendt & Kralisch (2009) A user-centric approach to identifying best deployment strategies for language tools: the impact of content and access language on Web user behaviour and attitudes

The results indicate that non-English languages are under-represented on the Web and that this is partly due to content-creation, link-setting and link-following behavoiur. User satisfaction is influenced both by the cognitive effort of searching and the availability of alternative information in that language.

Cost=time+cognitive effort

Not only capacities to access the site but also opportunities to access it, thus language is only one factor.

• Language can be expected to not only influence the total amount of information available to Web users, but also how information sources (i.e. Websites) are linked among each other and therefore how easy/likely it is to find and access a certain Web site.

• Bharat et al. and Halavis are first indicators of the potential impact of language: Website in different languages are less connected than sites in the same language (note: studied data aggregated on the national level and therefore only limited insight into the role of language.
  

"Web sites are, in most cases more likely to link to another site hosted in the same country than to cross national borders. When they do cross national borders, they are more likely to lead to pages hosted in the United States than to pages anywhere else in the world." (Halavais, A, 2000, p. 7)

Behavioural aspects of information seeking:

1. Users' information seeking behaviour,
   
2. information and information flow on the Web,

Attitudinal aspects of information seeking:

1. "usefulness", i.e. the language related value of information decreases as more information is offered in that language on the Web. "..value perceptions are also determined by topic; thus a large amount of content on a topic in a native language may also reduce the value of content on that topic in other languages.
   
   
2. "ease of use", i.e. the cost of language processing during information seeking can be expected to affect attitudes in Web search.
   

Results on behavioural aspects

1. Non-English languages are under-represented on the Web in terms of the amount of content supplied.
2. Search engines do not register all pages linking to the site, and many links known to the search engine were not used. This indicates that non-English language s are under-represented on the Web in terms of the links that content creators set to content in those languages.
3. Users have a clear preference to navigate in their native language when it is available via a link, but if that is not available they accept the necessity to navigate in English.
4. This all means: behavioural tendencies both of content providers and of content users lead to mutually reinforcing under-representation of non-English languages. Compared to the respective market size or available options, there is less content in these languages, this content is linked to less and the links are followed less often.
   

Results on Attitudinal stuff:

1. A complex interplay of English language skills, the perceived saved effort of using native-language content, the perceived overall supply in that language on the Web, and satisfaction:
   
   
2. People who are proficient in English often prefer to navigate in English (even if offered content is their own language) and are more scrutinised of the quality of Web content. Do not care much about whether sites make efforts to provide them with content in their own languages.
   
   
3. People who are not so proficient in English do perceive the (real) scarcity of information in their native language and are highly appreciative of content in this language.

This means that content and search-tool designers should not draw simplistic conclusions based on behaviour alone, because this is not a reliable indicator of attitudes and preferences. In the absence of links and/or content in their native languages, users will acquiesce to English-language content. However, their preference will persist.

Berendt, B., & Kralisch, A. (2009). A user-centric approach to identifying best deployment strategies for language tools: the impact of content and access language on Web user behaviour and attitudes. Inf. Retr., 12(3), 380-399.

HALAVAIS, A. (2000). National Borders on the World Wide Web.New Media Society, 2 (1), 7-28. doi: 10.1177/14614440022225689.

Bharat, K., Chang, B., Henzinger, M. R., and Ruhl, M. 2001. Who Links to Whom: Mining Linkage between Web Sites. In Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE international Conference on Data Mining (November 29 - December 02, 2001). N. Cercone, T. Y. Lin, and X. Wu, Eds. ICDM. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 51-58.

A touch screen for schools for less than 50€

I love the do-it-yourself attitude of some e-learning tech support guys! Marko Puusaar just showed to us here in the e-university conference what he hacked together based on http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii.

In the picture you can see the touch screen for less than 50€. It took him about 15min, and that is with all the explanations of parts included!!



The pieces needed are: a Wii remote control, which will work through blue-tooth with your computer, a bit of software (there are pay versions, or free ones for educational use), and a Infra-red pen, which he did himself to look like a normal pen.

The Ada Lovelace pledge "Ms. Mayer"

Some time ago I pledged to this one: "I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same." I do to honor Ada Lovelace.

So here I go: since the first moment I set my eyes on it, I thought there was something that set it apart from the crowd. It must have been sometimes in 2000 or so. The name was catchy too, but what I most admired was the plain, simplistic look, almost too little, and yet, everything was there. Ever since I've admired the almost iconic look of it.

A couple of weeks back when visiting D&D in San Fransisco, we were drinking coffee and reading the Sunday edition of New York Times, I got across an article about Google's design. I learned that "Ms. Mayer controls the look, feel and functionality of the Internet’s most heavily trafficked search engine."

Of course, I thought, that is why the interface looks so DAM GOOD, it's a she!

The article got a few "Hyvä Suomi!" when I learned that since a kid she had admired the design of Marimekko, something that every Finnish kid from the seventies has imprinted in their brain. So, she's got Finnish ancestors too! "Hyvä Suomi!"

Apart from being the employee no: 20 and Google's first female engineer, she seems to like a good party and is comfortable on skis. Petty darn impressive! Thanks for being there!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
an interesting interview on Marissa Mayer (where she wears an awful shirt, oups...)
http://www.charlierose.com/view/clip/10136

Sneak preview: SIRTEL'09

Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL'08) in the International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL) 2009 in Aachen, Germany, August 21, 2009
http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/workshops.html


IMPORTANT DATES

Contribution Submission: June 14, 2009
Results Notification: July 13, 2009
Camera Ready Submission: July 31, 2009
Workshop date: August 21, 2009

CALL FOR WORKSHOP CONTRIBUTIONS

We are delighted to welcome exciting new contributions for the 3rd SIRTEL workshop

• Research papers
• System Demos
• Hands-On proposals
• Abstracts for "Pecha Kucha"

RATIONALE

Learning and teaching resource are available on the Web - both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors). They can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The remaining challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate Social information retrieval (SIR) methods, techniques and systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance in potentially overwhelming variety of choices.

The aim of the SIRTEL’09 workshop is to look onward beyond recent achievements to discuss specific topics, emerging research issues, new trends and endeavors in SIR for TEL. The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to present, and more importantly, to discuss the current status of research in SIR and TEL and its implications for science and teaching.

The proceedings from the last years:
- SIRTEL'07 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-307
- SIRTEL'08 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-382


TOPICS OF INTEREST (but not limited to):

• Recommender systems and collaborative filtering in educational settings
• Defining the scope, purpose and objects of social information retrieval in TEL
• Novel ways of generating input for recommenders (explicit and implicit methods)
• Ranking of search results to support individualised learning needs
• Integrating SIR services in existing educational platforms
• Folksonomies, tagging and other collaboration-based information retrieval systems
• Social navigation processes and metaphors for searching information related to teaching and learning
• Social networks and interactions in learning communities to facilitate information sharing and retrieval
• Approaches to TEL metadata reflecting social ties and collaborative experiences in the field of education
• Pedagogic decisions, recommender systems and how to contextualise recommender system to support learning processes.
• Interoperability of SIR systems for TEL
• Visualisation techniques in learning and teaching
• Semantic annotation and tagging for social information retrieval purposes
• Evaluating the performance of SIR systems in educational applications
• Measuring the effectiveness of SIR systems in supporting learning and teaching
• Evaluation the user satisfaction with SIR systems in supporting learning and teaching

WORKSHOP SUBMISSIONS

The workshop invites several types of contributions which allow a wide level of participation:

• Research papers (upto 8 pages)
• System Demos (upto 2 pages)
• Hands-On proposals (1-pager)
• Abstract for Pecha Kucha (1-pager)

The workshop proceedings will be published as CEUR Workshop Proceedings online at http://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/. Copy rights will be reserved.

Please use the same template as the one for the main conference with details at http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/submission.html. Workshop paper length is not limited.

All questions and submissions should be sent to: sirtelworkshop@gmail.com
The website with the call will be up shortly too.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
• Alexander Felfernig, University of Klagenfurt, Germany
• Brandon Muramatsu, MIT, USA
• Frans van Assche, European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium
• John Dron, Athabasca University, Canada
• Lloyd Rutledge, Open University of the Netherlands, NL
• Markus Strohmaier, Technical University of Graz, Austria
• Markus Weimer, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
• Martin Wolpers, Fraonhofer-Institut, Germany
• Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala, Spain
• Olga Santos, UNED, Spain
• Rick D. Hangartner, MyStrands, USA
• Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Wolfgang Reinhardt, Universität Paderborn, Germany
• Xavier Ochoa, Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, Ecuador
• Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Zinayida Petrushyna, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

OER Creating connections: content, users, tags

I'm in the Hewlett grantees meeting now and marveling all the work that has been done in the area of Open Educational Resources. I had a chance to present some of the work here that we are doing with OER. I focused on creating connections, which I think is one of the most important things for the content. Knowing how it all is connected together is important in order to make sense of all the small pieces of separate content. Here are the slides, I give a few explanations.

Learning Resource Exchange -OER Hewlett Mongerey

View more presentations from Riina Vuorikari. (tags: lre eun)

The LRE is an access point to 16 content providers who make resources available to teachers in Europe and elsewhere. It's pretty much like any conventional content portal, but we have added a social tagging and bookmarking tool on top of it.

A good part of the slides show how we can make connections between pieces of content from different repositories, and how those content pieces can bring users togeher across country and language borders. In the visualisations, the little dots (nodes) are resources that are connected to other resources or users through tags and bookmarks.

Moreover, I give a few pointers to research that we have done on creating better navigation to the content, evaluating whether it is efficient or not, and also looking into the quality of tags.

Are tags from Mars and descriptors from Venus?

A study on the ecology of educational resource metadata.

I just finished a paper on the tag evaluations that we did in the MELT project. We had lots of fun with the name of the paper :) the main question being which one, tags or descriptors, should be from Venus...?

Anyway, we were able to show that not all the tags are as far from the Thesaurus descriptors as Mars is from Venus. We had different perspectives for evaluations: end-users, expert indexers and repository owners. For me the most interesting thing that came up was that 11% of end-user generated tags are actually terms that we can find in our multilingual Thesaurus! I assume teachers are "better taggers" than average, usually there is lots of talk about the gap between end-users' language and the one deployed by experts.

Abstract. pdf. In this study, over a period of six months, we gathered empirical data from more than 200 users on a learning resource portal with a social bookmarking and tagging feature. Our aim was to look at the tags from different stakeholders’ points of view; end-users, librarians/expert indexers and repository owners. We first look how users tag resources, and then conduct an evaluation with indexers to understand how they perceive the value of tags as descriptors. We then present a case study from a repository owner’s point of view. Lastly, we study users’ clickstream when searching resources. We find that, even though end-users and expert evaluators apply very different strategies when adding metadata, (end-users have a rather synthetic approach whereas expert indexers an analytical one) there is an overlap in the information in tags and the official descriptors, this overlap is even up to 51%, creating an ecology of metadata.

Keywords: Learning resource metadata, tags, folksonomy, clickstream,
thesaurus, evaluation.

"Thesaurus-tags"

One of the particularities of the MELT portal is that apart from being a "traditional" resource portal, we also have social tagging-features implemented. This creates a situation where resources have both indexing terms that come from our multilingual Thesaurus, as well as teacher generated tags, that, btw, are also multilingual.

I was looking at the tags today with a specific question in mind: "How many of the user-generated tags are actually terms that exist in the Thesaurus?" If there is a tag that is added by a teacher, and if it exists in the Thesaurus, I will call it a "Thesaurus-tag".

Here are the figures:

• Distinct tags: 4428
• Tags applied: 5009
• Distinct "Thesaurus-tags": 505
• "Thesaurus-tags" applied: 714

I was actually really impressed: 11.4% of distinct tags are "Thesaurus-tags"! And if we look at tag application, "Thesaurus-tags" amount to 14.25% of all tags.

Moreover, 22.37% of distinct "Thesaurus-tags" are applied more than once. This amounts to 45.1% of all "Thesaurus-tag" applications! The top "Thesaurus-tag" were:
Europe (10), music (8), test (8), Vocabulary (8), Internet (7), art (6), biology (6), history (6), Australia (5), chemistry (5).

This is really quite interesting. On the one hand, we always ask ourselves how to make the Learning resource indexing better, and here we can totally "crowd source" part of the indexing, that is usually done by the experts", to end-users. If we think an end-user thought that a Thesaurus-tag was good enough to add for a resource, I can be pretty sure that it is also good enough for being an indexing term. The story can be VERY different for all tags, we do not think that ALL tags could become indexing terms, although we know they are good for other stuff.

On the other hand, being in the multi-lingual context, we have always a bit hard time with tags in different languages. At least with "Thesaurus-tags" we could easily show a translation of the tag, as we are certain it to be a good one.

There are lots of interesting things to see, for example, whether these resources previously had the same indexing term as the "Thesaurus-tag" was, i.e. was the tag redundant or does it really add some value to our system. It will also be interesting to see whether there was a trend; the resources that had poor/little indexing terms received more "Thesaurus-tags" from the end-users. Well, lots more, I guess, but that will be for another time.

Modelling the portal ecology: What goes around comes around

The three main actions on the portal: discover resources, play them and annotate. The two main group of users: ones logged-in and the others not.

I've divided the resource discovery process in three slots (Millen et al.):

1. Explicit search
2. Community search
3. Personal search

Play is when the user clicks on the link. We also call this implicit interest indicator, however, we are not sure whether it was relevant to the user or not. Worth noting anyway. This is also called "hits" or "click-through" in some lingo.

Annotation is when the user makes an explicit interest marking (indicator) on the resource, this can currently be either a rating (usefulness, scale 1 to 5) and bookmark with tags. Both of these actions are public.

About users and logs

In general terms we record all kinds of clicks and actions on the portal (see here). I studied the logs from the last 2,5 months. We know that we have 340 users who have a user name, excluding staff, etc., we have 168 "real" users. Out of them 82 had clicked on a resource on the portal at least once, so these users are included in the logs. Additionally, there are users who do not log, but I do not have any idea currently how many they are (check Analytics). There were 13 604 actions recorded, 40% from the ones who logged in and 60% by others who did not log in.

In general, we can think that the relationship between these 3 actions is important on the portal and can indicate something about its efficiency for users to get what they want, as well as for the system to get what is needed to keep it going. In our case, we are in the process of looking at how Social information can help the discovery. So, a perquisite is to have SI available, thus the system needs ratings and bookmarks.

With the contributing users (=logged-in) on the MELT portal:

• 2 searches result to one play;
• 2.6 searches result to one annotation, this can be either rating or bookmarking;
• 1.3 plays result to one annotation.
  

For the comparison, in Calibrate the figures were the following:

• 0.5 searches result to one play;
• 5.7 searches result to one annotation, this can be either rating or bookmarking;
• 11.3 plays result to one annotation.

I will study this further too. A quick look would say that a system, which emphasises Social Information for users own benefits (Favourites) and for everyone's benefits (allows Community browsing) like is the case with MELT, the loop for getting annotations is more efficient than in the system which does not make use of such information (e.g. Calibrate). The ration of search-to-annotation is 2.6 to 1 in MELT, whereas the same in Calibrate is 5.7 to 1.

However, if we look at the ration of "hits", the Calibrate system has been four times more efficient: it took one search to play 2 resources, whereas in MELT it took 2 searches for one play. The MELT system search function has been under constant development for speed, which has been somewhat problematic due to huge amount of content. I will report later on the same ration after our last optimisation effort.

What goes around comes around

Graph 1 depicts what is going on on the portal. I will explain this later in details. For each action I have indicated the percentage of total, e.g. Explicit search 78% is from all Explicit searches executed by non-logged in users.


Graph 1