Thoughts about "the Search"

So I've been reading the book with a quite interest, and I'll blurb about a few things that stuck and might be worth mentioning. In the very beginning J.Battelle (can't find the page number now, that dam Ctrl+F does not work with paper,..wait a minute, maybe I should go to Amazon and search inside the book!) mentions that about 25% of searches that people make are intended to find or re-discover something that they've seen or read before. That's a lot! When reading it I thought of myself and how many times that has happened. Of course by that Battelle makes the case for the clickstream and how it will be the key element of search in the days and years to come. I kinda also like the social bookmarking aspect to it, "keep found things found", but this requires intent and action from the user, which can be avoided by just saving every click you take. Comes close to one of the themes of my interest, the level of user input required.

I especially liked the parts where Battelle was visioning and letting off his obsession of Google personalities (he talked in quite a few occasions about them, them, them, like they were some bloody simiantwins with a weird management style. Shows that the author is a freelance journalist, aren't all the bosses power obsessed freaks!?). The parts where he talked about personalised search (p.259) and how search would be linked to all types of services around was inspiring (p. 167). Everything would be indexed, even your kids and car keys. Imagine: "Honey, can't find my kids, can you Google them for me?" Well, seriously, I really dig the idea that if I make a search on the Web the rendered results would not be the same as the results that the guy next to me gets even for the same search term.

The whole deal with AdWord and purchasing the keyword for marketing purposes makes me think of "tags" and how could we use that idea for better things in education. It was something that I was thinking of last summer when writing this, but now reading about AdWord and such, it all became clearer to me. People tagging their own content, photos, blog posting, school assignments, etc, would not only tag it for their personal knowledge management purpose, but also like an advertiser buying a keyword to match it with other's demand, the tagger would better match hers own content to what ever is out there that might be relevant to her. For the educational purposes, both for formal and informal education, the possibilities could be enormous. And I'm not talking about matching people selling you an on-line course in French, but matching other people with similar interest to you, creating social networks where they previously didn't exist and allow learning to take new turns.

Towards the end of the book (p.137) J.Battelle talks about the differences between Google and Yahoo!. That was a very insightful part, and something that we've seen coming. Think of the difference between Google search results (algorithm+ adWord) vs. Yahoo! with some editorial touch adding Yahoo!'s search shortcuts, Google news (algorithm) vs. Yahoo! News (editorial), and now the whole service that Yahoo! is offering with 360 degree (hmm, not much hype there anymore and still in beta!). MySearch is about adding a social layer of Friends and Friends-of-a-Friend on the top of your search "to better understand the intent of your query" (p. 259). I love that last phrase!

This, to me, brings me back to quite a few discussions that I've had with my professor about the way my research should take. He seems to be the Google guy, whereas I see something more interesting and, ahem, intentional, in Yahoo!'s approach. I want to be able to give the steering wheel to user and say, "Fine, point me to the direction that you want to go and I'll refine the search and give you the best stuff!", instead of trusting a Good-mighty-algorithm to trust that it knows better what you like than you even think you do. I see this polarisation appearing in many places, services and applications on the Web, and I think it's great. I always think that with all the technologies that we have today we should be able to serve people's different preferences, was it then the Google guy or the Yahoo! guy.

Finally, I want to highlight this about how search pretty much still works these days: "Like DOS before Windows or the Mac, search's user interface is pretty much command driven: you punch in a query, you get a list of results." I think there is much to impove out there (like I think there is much to improve with anything that requires command line, e.g. installing most applications on Linux and how it sucks deeply), and the good thing is that, like the book says in one page, the search as a research area is still pretty uncharted, some estimate that we've covered only one digit % of it so far. Good, more to do for me :)

Weekly PhD report week 5-6

Work done:

• Defined my research questions (below). Of course this is a piece of work that undergoes constant modifications, but at least this is now what I'm focusing on.
• Worked on the plan for the Social Information Retrieval chapter. This is something that I'll be working on for the next 3 months.
  
• The idea is to review some 20 LORs that use reviewing and ratings for LOs, look into classifying them using EQO model and repository, and eventually creating xml schema that allows saving them in a format that is interoperable. This was not only the metadata about a LO is interoperable, but also the annotation part.
  
• This becomes be part of the work Jehad is on.
  

Things to do:

• Continue by paper reviews
• Continue the LOR annotation reviews
• Enjoy the Idaho snow for the upcoming 2 weeks (20.2.-7.3.)

PhD research questions

Last weeks I've been trying to concentrate on defining my research questions. It's not an easy task. Firstly, there are so many things to look at, and then once you start framing the questions, they all becomes slippery and unclear, redundant and such. However, this is my last take on it:

Main question: What are the main barriers to discovery, re-discovery and use learning objects and how can Social Information Retrieval help?

• Subquestion 1: Are there any specific requirements for the recommender system for LOs?
  Do we need to have any kind of “pedagogically aware” data or is it enough to use the existing models (such as movie, book recommenders) based on CF and content filtering methods?
  
  
• Subquestion 2: What is the role of explicit information input such as ratings, reviews and annotations to enhance the discovery and and use of LOs? Related to "classical" collaborative filtering using ratings, reviews. (these are the reviews that people do mainly to help other people)
  
  
• Subquestion 3: How can tags, lists and bookmarks enhance the discovery, recovery and use of LOs? e.g. “Playlist”, a feature in teachers' basket that allows them to make lists of LOs for a lesson, course, etc. “sequencing” This is stuff that people do for themselves, as part of PKM.
  
  
• Subquestion 4: When using social information retrieval (SIR) techniques, what are the differences between anonymous (such as classical collaborative filtering using ratings, reviews) vs. self-manifested, explicit social networks (e.g. Yahoo MyRank2) as input for a recommender system? How do users perceive these, are there preferences, what type of interactions, etc? What would be the hybrid model like?

Weekly PhD Report 06, week 4

Work done:

- Presented the topic of my research interest at HMDB lunch

- Kept on reading research papers on different recommender systems and issues

- Finalised the chapter for the LOR review

Things to do:

- Continue by paper reviews

- Continue to work on my research questions and establish a plan for it

- Start preparing the work on a social information retrieval book chapter that was accepted in a call for contributions. See an abstract below

Towards Interoperable Social Recommendation: Storing, Sharing, and Reusing Evaluations of Learning Objects

Abstract

Since the early days of the use of digital learning resources in teaching and learning, quality has played an important role, sometimes more implicitly than explicitly. In the domain of digital learning resources, a plethora of ways to evaluate learning resources exists. However, limited ways to share and reuse these evaluations for social information retrieval purposes currently exist. Social recommendation is based on the opinions of the members of a community, in order to help individuals in that community more effectively identify content of interest from a potentially overwhelming set of choices.

This chapter emphasises the importance that the representation and storage of user experiences and evaluations of learning resources has, as a means to support social recommendation, and help users search the Web for learning resources in an effective and efficient manner. Thus, this chapter proposes a scheme for storing results from learning resources’ evaluation in a structured and reusable way, so that they can be shared between social recommendation systems. More specifically, the chapter develops an Evaluation Learning Object Metadata (evaLOM) model, a metadata schema that allows the description of the evaluation method used for learning resources, as well as storing its evaluation results. This model is part of a larger specification called Learning Object Log Specification (LO Log).

World according to World66

World66 ("the travel guide you write") is a great place, and it has become better and better over the years (still in perpetual beta, I see). There is this funny tool that let's you create a world map of countries that you've visited.

Mine looks like this:



Create your own visited country map
or check our Brussels travel guide

Weekly PhD Report 06, week 3

Work done:

• I worked on my initial and preliminary research questions
• Continued my paper review on different types and applications of recommender systems
• Worked on my study plans
• Worked a day in EUN and on my plan for 2005
• Blogged about the new round on EU patent law: http://flosse.dicole.org
  

Things to do remains pretty much the same:

• Continue by research reviews
• Continue to work on my research questions
• Give on more round on the LOR book chapter

Weekly PhD Report 06, week 2

Work done this week:

• Participated in the HMDB lunch about clustering
• Worked on the bookchapter about LORs.
• The good news: the deadline has been extended until the end of the month, so we'll have time to adapt it according to some comments (Thanks Jehad and Martin!)
• I'll send a new version around later this week in case someone wants to give it another try
• Continued my paper review on different types and applications of recommender systems
• Started working on my more precise research questions, hurray!
• Checked a new application called http://www.yelp.com/ It's a social networking tool where you can find, review and talk about what's going on in your neighborhood, meaning in SF and a few other big cities in the US.
• They have it all what you need nowadays for a YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YASNS), you can add your network of friends, profiles and a Firefox toolbar for a direct search.
• Tried to convince my promoter to do my pending administrational paper work
  

Things to do:

• I'll start at EUN again, only one day a week and with less to do than last year (oh yeah!)
• Continue my research reviews
• Continue to work on my research questions
• Continue to follow up the EC Patents discussion now with Open Consultation round
• Put hard pressure on my promoter to finalise my pending administrational paper work.
• Work on the LOR book chapter
  

Weekly PhD Report 06, week 1

work done:

• Started an extensive review on recommendation systems, especially looking for papers on LORs and social networks
• I'm looking especially design requirement and needs for LO recommender system, but interested in dilemmas found in the field and open questions such as what would the benefit of having a distributed service over a centralised one, etc.
  
• Worked on the book chapter on LORs that I sent you a while ago.
• Worked on a plan for the year and looked into some possible collaboration paths with people, namely picked up on an idea to write something with David Tosh from ELGG.
• Tried to revitalise the plan for NING developments in vain
• Kept Furling my reading and findings: http://www.furl.net/members/vuorikari
  

work to be done:

• Continue my reading and note taking on recommendation systems
• finalise the book chapter
• write a scenario for Jehad on using the logs for LO review purposes
• work on a plan to run a pilot on Ning
• keep up the good spirit

Weekly PhD Report 51-52

• Spent time writing a part for a paper "An Overview of Learning Object Repositories" with Argiris Tzikopoulos, Nikos Manouselis. Argis has made a survey on 59 repositories, and I was asked to help writing a part of it. I wish to send you this paper for comments later this week.
• Worked on a proposal for a book chapter which would be called "Towards Interoperable Social Recommendation: Storing, Sharing, and Reusing Evaluations of Learning Objects". The idea would contribute to Jehad&all's Log specifications. This would also be used for recommendation purposes. See the attachment for more information.
• currently reading lots of papers related to this, see: http://www.furl.net/members/vuorikari/LOR and
  http://www.furl.net/members/vuorikari/recommendation
• Played around with swicki, see: http://riina1-swicki.eurekster.com/
  • Swickis are community search engines that learn from users
    
    
• Checked out http://digg.com, the new hot tool for the community to review news. This is an interesting post about Digg and some other relevant social software.
  http://thomashawk.com/2006/01/digg-delicious-kaboodle-and-wink.html
• The kick in Digg is that when you submit a link there, it will be Dugg [imperfect] by other news readers. As soon as one post starts getting Diggs on it, i.e. it is read by many other who think it's relevant, it will climb higher up on the relevance ranking list, thus appear on the front page of the Digg.
  
• Worked on Ning.com application on social recommendation with Julien, Ben and Bram. We were not able to make it search Ariadne yet, but should be feasible soon.
• The issues seems to be that we added our, well, Julien's own SOAP library to make the connection. However, the Amazon services module in Ning is pure PHP running in the Playground, as are the modules that use other web services (such as Flickr and Gmail). they said "You should be able to make external HTTP requests from Ning just fine, whether using curl or PEAR's HTTP::Client (both of which we support)." Hmmm...
  
  

Weekly PhD Report 51-52

• Spent time writing a part for a paper "An Overview of Learning Object Repositories" with Argiris Tzikopoulos, Nikos Manouselis. Argis has made a survey on 59 repositories, and I was asked to help writing a part of it. I wish to send you this paper for comments later this week.
• Worked on a proposal for a book chapter which would be called "Towards Interoperable Social Recommendation: Storing, Sharing, and Reusing Evaluations of Learning Objects". The idea would contribute to Jehad&all's Log specifications. This would also be used for recommendation purposes. See the attachment for more information.
• currently reading lots of papers related to this, see: http://www.furl.net/members/vuorikari/LOR and
  http://www.furl.net/members/vuorikari/recommendation
• Played around with swicki, see: http://riina1-swicki.eurekster.com/
  • Swickis are community search engines that learn from users
    
    
• Checked out http://digg.com, the new hot tool for community reviewing of news.
• Worked on Ning.com application on social recommendation with Julien, Ben and Bram. We were not able to make it search Ariadne yet, but should be feasible soon.

10 Web Trends That Should Die in 2006

Yeah, there are so many good points. Things that I've been thinking about too, like spliting up the article (it is just so much easier to scrol down, don't you understand?), tiny font, etc.

One thing I would like to see on this type of a list is "Create the entire navigation menu in Flash". It is so last millennium, but people still keep doing it! I hate it, especailly because I don't have Flash installed in my default browser (I'm tired of seeing things and adds flying around on my screen). Many times those Flash navigation menus don't give any alternatives, thus I'm not even able to see the whole site. Dah, get over this, people!!

read more | digg story

Weekly PhD Report 49

Things done last week:

Unfortunately not much dedicated PhD work got done last week apart from some interesting encounters with researchers and practitioners attending the same event as I did, e.g. EduExchange in the NL http://eduexchange.kennisnet.nl/ and Eminent http://eminent.eun.org.

A few interesting leads I gathered: Networks seems to be popping up everywhere. Of course, not on the official agenda, but during the coffee brake discussions and dinner, etc. Many prominent e-learning researchers and practitioners dig the idea of bottom-up approach, thus social network analyses and social recommendations are being mentioned more and more.

Some interesting people I talked with:

• OUNL seems to be working also on social recommendation in the context of peer tutoring and a new EU project called tenCompetences. If interested check http://dspace.ou.nl/ for names such as R.Kopper, P.Slop and C.Tattersall.
  
  
• Had a chat with The Open University UK researcher R.mcCormick about how LOs are used by people and some ideas of looking at different links between the users and usage. This was interesting as I've thought about making similar analysis of the use of LOs once I get my experiment going with Ning.com.
  
• I thought it would be interesting in looking for hubs (influential people) in distribution of LOs through social recommendations and social/collaborative browsing. McCormick suggested that if any are found, it would be interesting to classify different types of connections that there are in this type of social network. That could help us better understand the nature of take-up of some LOs and some not, etc.
  

• Ulla Gjorling from UNI-C had done a study on the localisation of LOs within a project called eColors lead by EUN. They also made some recommendations for the ease of localisation. One of the outcomes was that producers rarely think about localisation, but it should be thought of while at the design and production phase, not later. Examples, translating some Flash files is labor intensive, but much easier if the text is inserted in an xml-file instead of within.
  
• This made me think that FOSS approach for ease of localisation should be adapted also for LOs, keep text separate from the code. Also, eColors talked about special localisation expertiece centers in Europe. They could use some SourceForge type of tools to make their job easier. This probably will be further investigate in a future project to enhance cross-boarder collaboration of LOs.

• Chatted up with James Simon from SUN who told me about SUN's involvement in Hypercomputing (not super computing anymore?..). They are about to build one with Japanese AMD and wish to get up on the ranking about the fastest computers. Cool to know people like that! I also mulled over my PhD work a bit with him to get some validation for the idea. He seem to think it was important.
  
  
• Quality of learning resources seems to be popping up in every country in Europe. The leading work is done by BECTA, UK and the National Board of Education in Finland (both about to finalise: see insight.eun.org/dossiers).
  
• Also, Poland, Switzerland, Hungary, Italy (INDIRE), Slovakia have work in planned/in progress. A lot of synergies can be picked up and one plan is to make a peer review process of UK and Fi work to see what aspects of work can be transfered to European level, and what is laterally transferable from one country to another.
  
  
• Galvin Conor from UCD Dublin sat next to me during dinner. We talked about academic research, PhDs, Summer Schools and such. He recommended me one Summer School, but I seem to have forgotten it. We also talked about networks and how ideas spread out. Too bad that I can't recite all the important things that were said, but the Eifel tower cruise on a boat was great!

Voila quoi, that was my week.


Things to do:

- Work on the bookchapter on "An overview of Leanring Object Repositories"

- Work on the abstract for the book on social retrieval mechanism.

- as usual

Weekly PhD report 48

Things done:

• Attended the Quality in eLearning conference for Innovation in Berlin.
• organised a special interest group (SIG) for the quality of digital learning resources, the work should be carried out within 2006. More info will be found later at: http://www.qualityfoundation.org/
  
• Moderated a workshop session on Quality of digital learning resources, see a report about that at:
  
• http://insight.eun.org/ww/en/pub/insight/interoperability/developments/quality_of_resources.htm

• Heard that I received a scholarship for 2 years from Finland. Let's celebrate that later!

Todo-list will remain the same, no much progress there :(

The Top 20 Edu Blogs

Where's Glenn?: 11/21 - 11/25: "BlogThis!"

Ok, one of those blogger guys again, sigh, who put their picture in the front, side bar and everywhere. Makes me really wonder what is this blogging really about..?

Anyway, he's put up a list of the Top 20 educational blogs. Some names that I read regularly, some more sporadically, some I don't even know. Pretty anglo-saxon, though..

A few words about the open source for education in Europe conference

You can find the whole posting at the link. It was FUN! The picture about me does not work on the blog posting, but here it is again.

I'm frustrated about blogging, it takes so much time! And I don't seem to understand what the trackback is about :( Yeah, and then all these postings in different blogs just kill me. There! It feels better ones it's out!

Weekly PhD report week 42

Things I've done on week 42:

• Attended EUN Policy Innovation Meeting about quality in e-learning
• Presented the EUN framework on quality of learning resources based on the paper that I co-wrote with Frans Van Assche
• Attended Xchange 2005 meeting in Brimingham
• Worked on organising a Special Interest Group on quality of learning resources in Europe
• Prepared the pedagogical workshop for CGIAR

_Things I plan to do this week:_

• Attend the first e-portfolio plugfest in Cambridge
• Attend the international Europortfolio 2005 conference in Cambridge where I present a paper on the use of portfolio in teacher training in EU and run a workshop.

testing, no time to write this week,

nor week before for that matter...

Been in Birmingham for Xchange 2005 and tomorrow going to Cambridge for eP Plugfest and Europortfolio 2005.EPICC project

Weekly PhD report week 40

things done last week:

• attended the HMDB seminar (Jehad's presentation)
• worked for 2 days on EUN's new concepts for learning resources repository where my brainstorming contributed for ideas in the area of social networking and evaluation of learning resources.
• The idea of "school bag" was conceived. The "school bag" would do what social bookmarks do on the web; it would be a place where users can create their logs of the learning resources they have used (with some evaluation and "MyTeachingIdea") and also bookmarks on interesting resources within repository ("keep found things found") that the user can use in a later occasion. The bookmarks could, for example, be used by a teacher to create a ready-selected lists of learning resources for learners in a given subject. Furthermore, the idea is that schoolbag could be managed by using tags as labels. Furthermore, the schoolbag would be used as a base for recommendations, but also would allow social navigation.
  
  
• How to integrate social bookmarking services as we know them now on
  the web into acquisition of learning resources within a LOR
• Worked on the concept of future work in the area of quality in e-learning in-learning and checked any work in Prolearn
  
• Worked on a paper for Open source in European education
• Started a new blog hosted in KUL. Not many things there yet: http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/wordpress/rvuorikari/
• btw; I post these activity reports on my other blog where you can get feeds from here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/smallThingsConsideredByRvuorikari
  
  
  

things to be done this week:

• Work on the ped.part of the workshop for ICRAF workshop
• Conduct business as usual

Weekly PhD report: Week 39

• Attended ICL 05 in Villach and presented a paper in a workshop called "Can personal digital knowledge artefacts' management and social networks enhance learning?"
• had some feedback from different people which was valuable for me

• Thought about how to use the lifecycle of LOs to assure better targeted quality (i.e. fit for purpose) through a Multi-attribute recommender or something.
• the idea would be to define criteria that represents important qualities of each lifecycle ("whenever I search I want my LOs to have the pedagogical metadata included"; "whenever I search I only want LOs that have been evaluated by other users",..)
• user could define what do they find important or this could also be extracted automatically based on previous searches logged; phase one is not important to me, phase 2 is important, etc.
• this would be saved and/or redefined with each search
• system would render only replies fitting to this criteria
• this profile could also be for ranking and personalising the search results.
  

Things I plan to do this week:

• keep on thinking and reading and re-visiting my research plan

Weekly PhD report: Week 38

• Thought about how to harness the power of social bookmarking in the context of a LOR. This is related to my research question about recommendation system based on social networking, but also to an initial problem within EUN's repository:
• Many resources used by teachers are links to webpages. Teachers don't feel like adding them into a repository. If they are encouraged to use social bookmarking tools on the web, how could we make sure that the resources can be re-used in our LOR?
• What service to use? If use delicious, for instance, should the date be left on their server and use an API to integrate it into EUN's services? Or should the data be entered into our repository - incompatibility of the elements. some analysis of a few bookmark exports in a table of the attachment
• Also, how could the social part of collaborative filtering be taken advantage of in the context of a LOR?
• Social bookmarks on the Web are what a "shopping basket" (integrated in CELEBRATE, teachers could bookmark LOs that they found interesting for later use) is for a LOR.
• A memo about the initial research questions in this context as attachment.
• on-going thinking
  
  
• Reading "Linked" by Barabazi.
  
• Made my think whether the links between social bookmarks and their users should be analysed and maybe visualised and if yes, for what reason.
  
• Some discussions about this with Joris and Nikos (from KHT).
• on-going thinking
  
  
• Worked on my ICL presentation: Thought about a classification for end-user authoring tools on the Web 2.0:
• Webpublishing tools: weblogs and wikis
• Content syndication tools: Webfeeds'readers (RSS, Atom, ..)
• Tracking services: Technorati, and what's after that?
• Artefacts' management and social networking: Flickr, Delicious,
• hybrid services combining parts of above.
  
  
• Read and thought about Web 2.0 and found these images very inspiring:
• Tim O'Reily (yes, he's got a Flickr account) http://www.flickr.com/photos/36521959321@N01/44349798/
• Alex Barnett http://www.extremepodcasting.com/extremeimages/web2.0_enabled_content_small.jpg
  
  
• Contributed in co-writing a proposal for a chapter "An Overview of Learning Object Repositories" for a book called “Learning Objects for Instruction: Design and Evaluation” with some old project partners from
  

Informatics Laboratory
Division of Informatics, Mathematics & Statistics
Dept. of Science, Agricultural University of Athens, Greece

• As a part of an eContent project they have done a review of 59 LOR, but their main focus is on agri-topics.

• Finalised a co-authored paper for Europortfolio 2005 on "National policies and case studies on the use of portfolios in teacher training"
  
  
• Drafted a paper for Open Source for Education in Europe called "Open Content and Source: European Schoolnet Riding the Wave"
  
  
• my readings for the week can be found at: