The London Tube Map is an iconic work of design. Every day of the year it probably helps many thousands of visitors to London and some locals as well navigate their way around this incredible and essential piece of transport infrastructure. The map itself has an interesting history - for an overview see wikipedia (yes, wikipedia - sorry to anyone who snubs it but its a formidable place on the 21st century Web infrastructure). It’s not a geographical map but a schematic one that ‘displays stations etc in relation to each other.
Having visited London a few times over the years I, like many infrequent visitors have come to rely on this map for getting me around the city. However the other day I received a very powerful lesson that this iconic map (fantastic as it is and probably appreciated by millions around the world) is not as helpful as it could be to many people. I walked into a station with an idea of where I needed to go but no idea which lines to take to get there so I went over to the nearest map on the station wall. At the map there was a young guy obviously having difficulty trying to find the station that he needed to get to and he was tracing his finger along a number of lines seeking a particular station. A few people behind him were starting to become impatient and were huffing and puffing and making their irritation known. The young guy was visibly starting to get uncomfortable and just wanted to find his station and get out of there as quickly as possible (its a busy place and it wouldn’t be long before more people would be milling around the map).
He was getting nowhere and in the end turned around past the people who were venting their frustrations and asked someone ‘can you tell me what colour this line is, I am colour blind and cannot work out the name of the line. Well, at that the indignant group behind him fell very silent indeed. Someone kindly told him it was red and within two seconds he had located his station and rapldly moved away.
The only way of telling the lines from each other on the map are by their colour but two of the lines on the tube map are red and green, which apparently are difficult colours for many colour blind people to discern. The only way of finding Central line is to look up the index where you will see ‘Central’ next to a red line. Once the guy in the station knew which line was ‘Central’ he was immediately on his way.
Over the years the tube map has changed a bit and it wasn’t always just colours that helped identify the lines so there has been some willingness to change it. On the website for ‘Transport for London (TfL) there is a black and white version available but we don’t always carry a laptop or netbook around with us which we can just open up and browse the Web with at any station. Smaller devices have their own accessibility problems. TfL however does have a commitment to accessibility on their website and has a number of different variations of the map. I guess if you are forewarned the black and white version is there for you and you could print a version off but it is not the same as having nice big maps on the wall in every station that you can just walk up to and browse as you need.
Apparently about 7% to 10% of males suffer from some form of red-green colour blindness so I guess every day hundreds (at least) of Underground users are confused by the map.
I downloaded a copy of the tube map and modified it in my photo imaging software rendering it in sepia colours. What a difference that made. Instead of seeing colours easily recognisable now most lines were just brown. Looking at the index and then the map made no sense at all. Now I guess I was experiencing a loose approximation of what it might be like not to be able to discern colours. Red and green both looked brown. I was going to post this image on the blog but from what I understand there are some pretty tight controls on making images of it. Anyway, its easy enough for anyone to do for themselves but I can tell you, it makes a big difference.
At a presentation on accessibility I once attended the presenter contended that all of us (able bodied, normally sighted etc) suffer from some disability at some point but for most this may only be temporary (eg unable to walk while recovering from a sport injury, age taking its toll on eyesight etc). Seeing someone inconvenienced and embarrassed by an incident such as the one I saw, minor as it may seem in the scheme of things, is an important reminder of the responsibility service providers must have when developing their services, Web, education or otherwise. Being vigilant, we can all learn how to improve our services.
ePortfolio 2009 has run its course and participants from all over the world will start heading home hopefully filled with ideas and enthusiasm for moving the eportfolio agenda forward. During the conference Dr. Helen Barrett mentioned that reflection was at the heart and soul of eportfolios and this was a recurring theme throughout the various workshops and presentations that I attended. Reflection is a core process in many types of eportfolios and it is through this process that we come to learn much about ourselves, what we have achieved, what we are capable of, what our hopes and aspirations are.
Another recurring theme during the conference was the personalisation of learning and there was much debate on that. As one keynote speaker noted, ‘learning always has been and always will be a personal experience…it is the organisation of education that is impersonal. The impediment has been economic scalability. Technology is making personalisation achievable at scale.’
Many at the conference also noted the problem of definition for eportfolios ‘ask ten people and you will get ten different answers’. It was interesting to see in the presentation from the University of London’s Computer Centre that they actually offer two eportfolios in the online environment that they provide to their students. One is for assessment and the other is for their learning experience - it is through this one that students are able to reflect.
Speaking of reflection, the closing session offered an opportunity to reflect on the conference, on eportfolios in general and to ponder the future for eportfolios. While there are many outstanding implementations of eportfolios in educational institutions of all sorts around the world and an increasing number of regional or industry specific eportfolios emerging, eportfolio as a concept remains a difficult sell for many. In the business of education, they are often not seen as essential as say a student record system, LMS or accounting system for example. What value do they offer?
Those at the conference obviously have a keen interest in eportfolios and understand the profound impact that reflection can have in learning but is this view more widely supported? Do eportfolios really make such a difference and if so, why aren’t they more widely adopted or appreciated? Eportfolios seem to have gained quite some ground in Europe, the USA, New Zealand and arguably Australia but what about the rest of the world? There would seem to be many more very technologically advanced economies and societies that don’t seem to be pushing the eportfolio agenda much at all when compared with these regions. Is it that reflection is not valued as highly in areas where eportfolios have not been adopted with the same vigor?
In regional or industry specific eportfolios, is the takeup and continued use of eportfolios as high as their providers originally envisioned? If not, what are the reasons preventing such use? What value do users see in them? If they see no significant benefits they are hardly likely to use them. Even in institutional eportfolios strong motivations need to be provided. Do users understand or value reflection? Given a blank page on which to reflect how and where do you start? Are your thoughts/reflections going to remain private once they are in the system and does this matter to you?
So… is the very thing that makes eportfolios potentially so beneficial also a real barrier to their widespread adoption (something to reflect upon)?
In a previous post I briefly reminisced on the development of interaction devices with computers over the years. Today we are seeing an incredible array of devices and the games arena seems to be the area really pushing the limits. In that post there was an embedded video on Microsoft’s Natal that I thought demonstrated tremendous potential for that technology in education and training - then I saw this amazing post on the BBC News:Technology site -
Now that should really get educational technology innovators excited! Imagine having your own virtual mentor or any number of other incredibly powerful educational scenarios. Of course Microsoft and developers on their platform such as Lionhead Studios aren’t the only ones doing amazing things. We’ve seen the huge success of the Nintendo Wii and many innovative uses it has been put to. Sony is right up there too as this report from the BBC also shows. The E3 Games conference really showcases just how rapidly that industry is evolving and the BBC has done a superb job highlighting and reporting on what was on show. There are many lessons to be learned from the games technology industry by educators and the educational technology industry.
It’s great to look at the way input devices have changed over time. From what I understand the QWERTY keyboard was a way to slow down typists initially way back when we had mechanical typewriters. The seemingly random placement of the keys was supposed to slow users down to a speed that the mechanical bits could keep up with. I have been around long enough to remember the confusion some encountered the first time they used a mouse to interact with a computer. Along the way we have seen trackpoints, trackpads, the ipod ‘wheel’, any number of games controllers, joysticks, chords everywhere, introduction of wireless input devices, ‘wands’ from Nintendo, multitouch screens, interactive whiteboards, the Playstation Eye, tablet pcs, iPhones and many others. The Wii from Nintendo was a revelation for me - it brought using the body rather than just the eyes and fingers into the mainstream. So what’s next? I just found this on the Guardian UK’s Games Blog:
Obviously there is tremendous potential in the gaming arena but think how easily this could be applied to an education or training setting. How about in skills development, rehabilitation - the use of feedback in this is just great.
And - you don’t have to worry about losing the device - you are it!
My Twitter feed is starting to get a heap of activity about bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, so I thought I better check it out.
There’s an interesting conversation going on over at Robert Scoble’s friendfeed - must be great to have so many connections - but even with all the opinion going on, it’s still good to kick the tyres yourself.
On launching bing in my browser I was presented with a great image of Santorini and now I just want to go on holidays there. I tried a couple of searches and the first thing I noticed was the speed - its ‘google-like’! It’s also great to have a nice, clean, simple search interface, unlike some of the horrendous offerings on some of the portals that are seen as competitors to Google.
I have only tried a few searches so its hard to comment with authority on the quality of the search results but they seem generally ok in the same way that Google’s are generally ok. Context is still an issue for these search engines. Try doing a search on ‘bing’ and you will see what I mean. At the time I tested Google seemed to have better search results for me than Bing did when I used ‘bing’ as the search term.
Next thing I noticed was the lack of ads down the right side which was a big plus for me. However, that was when I searched for ‘eportfolio’, a keen interest of mine. When I then searched for ‘bing’ there was a sponsored link at the top of the search results, and it was for something totally irrelevant to me (sorry Bing Lee whoever you are and whatever you are trying to sell on eBay). Ads can be annoying but when they are totally irrelevant and in a prominent position they can be really irritating.
Some work to do there I think - at least its all Beta so it has a ready made excuse.
There is an attempt at providing some context through related search suggestions (down the left side) but no joy there at all for the afore mentioned ‘bing’ search if you are interested in Microsoft Bing.
Google also has some really cool ways of displaying results now (discussed previously here) that Bing doesn’t match.
So what else does it offer? There are a number of links to other Microsoft related services such as Windows Live and ninemsn. The latter one is a bit of a turn-off for me as I really don’t like using a search engine provided by a major (in this part of the world) traditional media outlet. This is one of the main reasons I don’t use the local Yahoo! offering unless I am getting no joy on other search engines.
When I compare the various menu options available from Google and Bing I probably get to the real reason why it will be difficult for me to switch search engines from Google to Bing. I am a user of a number of Google’s other services and it is just too convenient for me to have Google as not just my default search engine, but my default home page in my browser. This is going to be a real challenge to Microsoft - how do you convince people to switch search engines to you when it’s not just search that people are invested in? I guess if you are a Windows Live user then this decision would look quite different.
Unfortunately for me at the moment there doesn’t seem to be a really compelling reason to switch search engines but I am really hoping that someone, maybe Microsoft with Bing, can offer some serious competition in the search marketplace.
So this morning when I started up my computer and loaded its email client there was a small wave of emails about this thing called Google Wave. Something’s happening over there at Google’s developer’s conference. It seems that in the keynote they have announced a new product/service called Google Wave. From the Google blog, we get the developer’s story on Wave has evolved from an idea to where it is today. There is kind of an explanation on what it is - some kind of collaborative email (think like a cross between wiki, instant messaging and email and then throw in some rich text editing, multimedia embedding etc). SMH has a very brief article on it too that highlights the local (Australian) role in it - the developers. The O’Reilly blog has a much better description. On the O’Reilly blog there are some screenshots which help explain it a bit further.
It looks like an interesting way of developing an idea collaboratively and potentially, very quickly which as O’Reilly points out, is a key feature of Google’s services:
A key point here is that Google’s relentless focus on reducing the latency of online actions is bringing the online experience closer and closer to our real world experience of face-to-face communication. When you’re talking with someone, you know what someone is saying before they finish their sentence. You can respond, or even finish their sentence for them. So too with Wave.
The real-time connectedness of Wave is truly impressive. Drop photos onto a wave and see the thumbnails appear on the other person’s machine before the photos are even finished uploading.
Will it catch on? Not all Google’s products instantly turn to gold (think Google Lively as a recent example) but they’re out there trying and obviously have the resources to innovate in a way very few companies can match. One aspect of Wave that may help is that its all going to be open - open source, open protocols etc so any developers can grab it and start innovating, developing new services on top of it, competing with it (good luck) etc.
On the area of real time editing and collaborating in email, I wonder what opportunities this creates for the spammers - imagine spam popping up while you are editing your wave! I am sure that won’t really be an issue but since its a Google service and revenue is derived from advertising, I can’t say that I would be surprised if contextual advertising popped up in real time while you are collaborating on the wave (there has to be a business model somewhere).
It would be interesting to put Wave into a classroom to see how teaching and learning can apply it. It has many of the features that students are already very familiar with and I believe they would very rapidly adapt to it and put it to some very interesting uses very quickly.
Google will be putting up a video on http://wave.google.com very shortly - at the time of posting it is not yet available but maybe by the time I change tabs and hit the refresh button, it will already be there!
The Wikimedia Foundation has just announced important changes to its licensing regime. The Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License will be used to “support greater interoperability and re-usability of Wikimedia content. The current GNU Free Documentation License will continue to be supported.”
All Wikimedia content can be used for any purpose, as long as proper credit is given and modifications are made available under the same terms. This open access approach to copyright is supported using a license which explicitly grants everyone those freedoms. The decision will result in all of the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects moving from the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) as their primary content license. The GFDL, which has served Wikipedia since its inception, will continue to be supported where possible, but not to the detriment of interoperability.
I guess this simplifies things for supporters and users of open content. The original licensing was geared more towards licensing software and so not 100% compatible with the content on Wikipedia. Creative Commons wasn’t around when it started up so I suppose this would have been the best option available that was inline with the creators philosophies and views on content.
How does this fit in with your own views on content or the way you work/teach/learn? Are you allowed to use or recognise the value of open content and how to use it? Apparently Wikimedia has over 6 million articles across it sites which will make a nice addition to the 160 million or so CC licensed resources that are already out there. Used with an understanding of how to assess the validity/accuracy etc of content, open content seems like a good thing to have at your disposal.
Just the other day I was trying to find some reviews on a particular software product but was really only interested in quite recent ones. As the product in question has been around for some years there were plenty of reviews about it but I had a really difficult time finding recent ones with Google. When I got to work this morning and checked my Twitter feed I found an interesting tweet leading me in the direction of Google and their ‘Searchology’ event held this week. At the event they announced some new features including ‘Search Options’ and ‘Rich Snippets’. Search options looks really interesting and provides some great ways of examing your search results and helps you get answers easily to questions like my above mentioned problem.
The following video from Google provides a nice overview of all that this new feature does:
As well as looking at recent results you can look at videos, forums and reviews. Results can be displayed in different ways such as visually or on a timeline (for me its interesting to look at the timeline search and compare it to how we have implemented a similar feature for one of our customers).
Rich Snippets looks interesting in that they:
extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing. For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant’s price range”
Rich snippets rely on other webpages using microformats and RDF to provide information to Google. Nice to see them looking at open and existing specifications here. For our own benefit, I think we will need to have a look at how this feature can enhance the services we provide for ourselves and our customers.
Quite some time ago (way back in June 2007) I posed this question in a post and while the intent was never really to answer the question with a yes, but to highlight some of the features that are important to eportfolios and their owners, it’s interesting to see that in some sort of manner, Google is now offering functionality that eportfolio owners would find useful. It has been possible to create a Google site for quite some time and call it your eportfolio (and many people do so very successfully). Just recently however, Google has released Google Profiles allowing you to create your own profile on Google and have it appear in Google search results. More information on the service can be found at the Google blog.
I guess what’s interesting or useful about this is that it does give you some control over what is displayed about you in a Google search results page when someone searches your name so you at least get one search result linking to something that you have created and hopefully it has a pretty good page rank. I haven’t seen this yet - still working on my profile.
So… one of the first things I went to do was to test out where I appear if I do a search. It seems to get a public profile you need to supply Google with quite a bit of information. A name, location and company is not enough. I got a message telling me that to have a public profile I need to supply more information. So I added a bit to the ’short bio’ area and created a link to my work blog. For the moment this was all I wanted to be public in my profile. Still, this wasn’t enough to satisfy Google. According to the blurb about Google profiles, it:
allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are
and
You have control over what others see
What’s not obvious is just how much information I have to add so that I can ‘control’ it. At the very least it would be nice to know what are the ‘mandatory’ bits of information I have to hand over or even what percentage complete I am (eg 70% would at least let me know that I am getting close to the threshold that they want).
One interesting aspect of creating my profile is that Google had selected an image of me from somewhere and gave me the option of changing it. The interesting part of this is that while the image was me, it was not one (as far as I can tell, and I am pretty confident in that) that I use on my Google account. It seems to have sourced it from somewhere else and I would really like to know where. I know of three social networks where I use this image and none of them have anything to do with Google. This begs the question of permissions and rights and what exactly I have signed up to in all those networks. Those terms and conditions are far to voluminous and complex for most users to really understand but that’s a whole other issue.
This week I was fortunate enough to attend the first two days of the National Career Conference run by the Career Development Association of Australia. The conference was really useful for me and gave me some great insights into the fantastic work careers counselors do, along with information on a number of programs the Government is funding. This was the first such conference I have attended which is a shame really as it would have been quite interesting to draw comparisons with earlier conferences.
There were two quite overwhelming impressions that I took away from my time at the conference. The first and most significant is the impact of the Global Financial Crisis. This was a recurring topic among many of the speakers and quite worrying for a number of the delegates that I spoke to. We are heading into the some of the more difficult economic times in living memory for many of us and those who work in the career development industry are going to play a very important role. As difficult economic times really start to hit hard, many workers will face difficult transitions and harsh times. New entrants into the workforce will also find it very difficult as employment rates rise and the jobs just aren’t there. How different this is from just a year ago when we were full of optimism, the mining boom was just going from strength to strength etc and the largest problem seemed to be skills shortages.
About a year ago we were seeing videos on Youtube and presentations on Slideshare providing all sorts of wonderful statistics on the changes that technology is bringing about (global mobile phone adoption, increase in use of Internet technologies, amazing social networking statistics, living online, the impact of the Web on our lives and changes in attitudes (eg the rising percentage of marriages where partners met online), and perhaps one of the more interesting, many of the jobs that students will get when they enter the workforce haven’t been invented yet). About that last one - now we are looking at something like the jobs just might not exist!
So how do we prepare for such an uncertain future? The rate of change is still going to apply - there will be new types of jobs as not much seems to be able to stop the rapid march of new and emerging technologies and the impact that they have on society but we are still facing very uncertain economic times. Difficult questions indeed and it would be interesting to be at the rest of the conference to see how it progresses.
The second impression that I took away from the conference was the apparent lack of engagement with technology in this area. The key theme for the conference was ‘Get Smart: Career Development value adds for people and business’. Now of course we don’t need to have or use high technology to be smart but there are many ways in which it can help. I would think that preparing people for a career in the 21st Century well would almost have to involve technology at some level. While there was some technology featured on the stands in the exhibition area I don’t think it really compared to what you see in other education related conferences these days.
Whenever I have been fortunate enough to attend an event in the VET or Higher Ed sector there has also been an online ‘buzz’ about the event with many users of Twitter or bloggers sharing their insights online as it happens and getting together online and consequently offline. I wasn’t able to tap into any of this activity at the event and I don’t think it was there. So for me the question is whether there is opportunity to add value in the area of career development with technology or whether it doesn’t really need it or whether I just missed it?
In summary must say that there are some great technology resources in the careers area such as Myfuture and it wasn’t possible for me to attend all workshops (parallel streams). Perhaps it was just the lack of laptops and netbooks in people’s hands/laps between and in sessions that gave me this impression.
