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About the Podcast December 30, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : tools , add a comment

My reasons for including a podcast in the online pilot exhibition were explained in the Research Proposal as:

In order to keep within the idea of exhibition however, I think a linear medium might be required. Something which forces the audience to take some time, sit back, start at the beginning and watch all the way through until the end. This could be done with either video, animation (Flash) or audio and I have chosen audio (podcast) in order to broaden my experience and I hope, keep things simple.

For something which had been added in to the presentation as an experiment, the podcast was well received and clearly needs to be explored further. Strangely to me, the last thing I expected would have been comments about the sound of my voice, but there was quite a lot of that. I thought quite a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of writing a script before podcasting, and in my report concluded:

I learned that an audio supplement is much appreciated by many online visitors but that unscripted ramblings may not be suitable for an exhibition.

Now reviewing the feedback (appendix 1, further down) after some time has passed, I realise that the idea of a podcast having to be either totally scripted or totally unscripted is a false one for two reasons. Firstly, podcasting is a new enough medium not to have any fixed style, and so either of those mentioned can be perfectly valid according to the purpose and audience. And secondly, there is a valuable in-between state, that of speaking from notes which is probably the best way to go for academic podcasting, building as it does on the tradition of public speaking.

So I would not be so categorical as Vix commenting on Stephen’s blog

“Did you read your podcast? It sounded read, which is totally unpodcast style.”

One thing I need to consider is the suggestion to provide smaller sized chunks of audio. “it may be good to use short clips to introduce the text area of the site.” and “but possibly could be available as both the whole and a choice of bite sized chunks”. If audio is to be embraced as an important supplement then perhaps links to audio clips can indeed be included as introductions to some of the pages on the main resource, while more informal podcasts might be embedded in blog entries if the occasion presents itself.

In order to pursue this further, I’ve obtained a little gadget which will allow me to record directly onto the Mac Mini (or a PC) called “The Griffin iMic” which is basically an external soundcard with some sockets and software, so I’ll be having a go with that soon and posting the results here.

Appendix 1 feedback about the podcast:

Marcus: Also liked very much your audio introduction and would urge you to do more of that. You have an excellent voice and should make use of it!

Denise: I found the 10 minute audio interesting, but wondered if you could use your creative talent further and produce one of your movies?

Sally: Have not been able to listen to podcast though? Do I need something I haven’t got?

Rosanna: As somebody else told you, your voice is simply terific, so you could invest more about it. I also liked your concepts but I found you to be too verbose and I couldn’t finish listening to the whole thing :) So, my suggestion is: map your concepts on a sheet of paper and follow a structured discourse while you are recording.

Lydia: I agree with Rosanna about mapping your ideas for audio, not necessarily a script but some points. In principle though the audio is really helpful as an introduction and it may be good to use short clips to introduce the text area of the site. Especially this may be a way of introducing new concepts on each page (technical or methodological).

Salena:I LOVED the podcast! Your voice was perfect for it, if someone is going to sit and listen to a recording with no visual stimulation about a relativley complex topic, an interesting and enthusiastic voice would seem to me to be essential and the tone of your voice and the way in which you covered the various aspects of the topic was just about right.

Eve:I like the podcast - easier to understand than reams of text - very good method of presentation for this - but possibly could be available as both the whole and a choice of bite sized chunks

Sarah: What I would like to have done is listen to your podcast whilst being able to click through links. . . . . I agree with others that your speaking voice is one of your greatest assets. You sound relaxed and managed to maintain my interest - so perhaps use more of it next time.

Unpublished: The podcast is a good way for explaining things, but not much good for asking questions. I listened to the outro about 4 times so far and am about to do so again. The text on the page seems wildly different. Please give a list of the podcast questions as text too. If the podcast is divided up, as someone suggests, please give a good pre-announce on the start of each one. For some reason, my player sometimes “shuffles” them. Not a big problem, but I’m sometimes slow to realise I need to hit the skip controls.

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Research Ethics December 23, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

I was particularly pleased to receive the comments from Rosanna Tarsiero after I sent an unsolicited email invite to the pilot exhibition. I think I’ll have to break up my response into different posts, since there is so much to work on.

On ethics Rosanna said,

As a starter on Internet research ethics:
http://www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf
It is *very* important that whatever the research is about we start with an ethical design and write a statement before starting collecting data.

That idea about writing a statement of ethics was just what I needed to do, to clarify my own ideas, to help with justification and to use in practise. I’m aware that the statement I’ve come up with is not fully comprehensive, there are some points which need adding, but I’ve also learned that no ethical policy ever can be complete and finished.

This is my statement as included in the report14 document and also included on my user page in the DARwiki:

Statement of Research Ethics

I will undertake each cycle or phase of research with a genuine intent to make improvements which I hope will bring benefit to myself and/or to others. Should it become apparent either to myself or as expressed by others that the action taken is having an opposite effect then I will abandon that cycle prematurely or take steps to mitigate the damage if the benefits are thought to substantially outweigh the disadvantages.

I will not take actions and decisions lightly, but after having given them serious reflective thought including an exploration of my own assumptions and motives.

I value the thoughts and opinions of others especially where they disagree with my own, and will endeavor to make space for them to be reported as a diversity with equal status.

Where personal writing is collected as data from anywhere other than fully public spaces, then permission to publish will be sought in each case, and anonymity will be offered as an option. In the case of data already published in public spaces where the implication of fair use is already granted, then I will ensure that the correct attribution remains attached to the author’s words but also be prepared to remove any such reference upon request, even after publication of my work.

The starter referred to is from the Association of Internet Researchers and that was a valuable lead in itself. I joined their mailing list just in time to hear one of the professors announce that he would no longer accept any of his students citing Wikipedia and an ensuing discussion which inspired Danah Boyd’s blog, and the appearance of Jimmy Wales to intervene on behalf of himself. I don’t yet know whether that discussion is typical of the AOIR, but if it it I will be a little disappointed not with the quality of discussion and views aired, but with the prevalent idea that Internet Research is all about looking things up on the internet for academic purposes. So maybe that particular group is the association for academic internet research, I’ll have to see.

Since then I’ve found a few other papers about Internet research ethics and added links to them on a new page - Ethics. If anyone knows more, please do add them in.

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Sock Puppets on Wikipedia December 23, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , comments closed

I’ve had a suspicion that a sizeable chunk of the central core of people playing the Wikipedia game are in fact veterans from the older usenet newsgroups game, and Shelly Power’s description of the use of ’sockpuppets’ and overzealous accusation of unrecognised accounts is all too familar….

Burningbird » Yo! Sock Puppets!
Contrary to popular assumption, there are levels of trust attached to Wikipedia contributors. True, anyone can edit; but the value of your edit is proportional to your previous contributions. In the case of those who voted to ‘Keep’ my entry, and based on a history of previous contributions, Samw decided that the respondents were ‘real’ and therefore ‘valid’. However, he judged previous contributions to be sparse by Wikipedia standards, and therefore several of the respondents were classified as ‘lurkers’.

Is being a lurker bad? There is no qualification of such one way or another in the Wikipedia guidelines about lurkers, as there is for sockpuppets. The latter, though, is strongly discouraged and if an account is identified as a sockpuppeteer, will be labeled as such and the account blocked.

Lots of comments there too.

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2005 was 88% worth it December 22, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

I think the folks over at 43things have always intended it to be a lighthearted and lightweight kind of web service, and the way every completed goal has to be tagged as either “worth it” or “not worth it” has given us some laughs over the year. Now they’ve provided a summary which adds them all up and hey - my 2005 turns out to have been 88% worth it, which seems a little on the high side to me, but then you can’t argue with quantitative data analysis can you?

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Year of the Wiki on Google Zeitgeist December 21, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , add a comment

Google’s zeitgeist of top searches for the year is not all that remarkable unless you want to know China’s favourite alternative search engine but the graph for “Wikipedia” maps an interesting taking off point around the end of summer.

Google.com - Top Gainers of 2005
1. Myspace
2. Ares
3. Baidu
4. wikipedia
5. orkut
6. iTunes
7. Sky News
8. World of Warcraft
9. Green Day
10. Leonardo da Vinci

phenom3.gif

Google Press Center: Zeitgeist

As the open source concept has moved from software development to photo-sharing to blogging, wikis – collaborative, editable web-based projects – have come into their own. And Wikipedia, the multi-language, meta-compendium of information has grown immensely this year.

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Response to Julie December 21, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

Another response to some of the feedback kindly left on my online pilot exhibition recently.

Julie wrote:

My research project is about engagement within Talking Heads

OK, I’ve read some of the ultralab papers about the first years of that project.

login_ncsl_t2l_logo.gif

Talking Heads is now part of a much bigger amalgamation of Online communities called talk2learn.
To be a member, you either have to be a headteacher, on a college programme, or have some other “worthy” educational objective. Even then, you’ll only get membership of certain communities, e.g. Talking Heads is exclusive to headteachers.

Thanks, I’ve applied to join the Innovation Unit community which seems to be the open one.

Interestingly, we’re now looking at the sort of sites you are developing to see how we can improve engagement within the talk2learn communities. The College commissioned some research which made the following suggestions:

*Put what’s on the inside outside to draw people in

That’s an interesting one which I’d like to contemplate better myself. Some examples would help.

*Let users organise the site more, develop a sense of “ownership”

I think that’s crucial, but the ownership has to some real extent be actual, and not just a sense. That’s a difficult balancing act to get right, and it’s all too easy to tell people their ideas and suggestions are all valued and considered while making them feel totally powerless in the situation whenever conflicting ideas or values turn up.

Indicators of a community which genuinely owns itself might be things like:

*They don’t feel the need to ask permission before taking actions
*ordinary members host and maintain the FAQ or other community documents
*Technical opportunity to change some aspects of the structure without having recourse to an external technical controller.
*Access to each others contact details so that the entire community could feasibly choose to migrate to another platform should they wish to.

*Less formal dialogue - “encourage small talk and the big ideas will emerge”.

If a culture has built up which makes people feel that only a formal style of dialogue is acceptable then modelling some ’small talk’ might well be a relief which allows a freer flow of communication. But if they interpret it as over-familiar and feel uncomfortable with that then it should be abandoned immediately. I’d imagine that time spent online is of the essence and if people feel they have to wade through too much ‘noise’ to get to the ’signal’ then they won’t bother.

I am going to try some of these suggestions in my research,
but I see you are already doing it!

I think a strength of the sort of communities you are developing, i.e. UK Cider, is that it is relatively easy to join, it gives participants a sense of empowerment and enables them to find a voice. They can overcome shyness by using a pseudonym if they wish, so there’s an element of anonymity.

On the ukcider wiki it’s true that many edits are made by people who don’t bother to log in, but they are just adding information, not holding conversations. On the mailing list however, even though it’s all archived on the public internet via googlegroups with no registration required, nearly everybody uses their real names and the odd one who doesn’t, attracts the occasional comment to the effect that their opinions are less valuable because of it.

Thanks again and best wishes for 2006.

Andy R

“The average Eskimo family consists of 1 female, 1 male, 2.4
children, 1.3 dogs, and 0.8 anthropologists”

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unexpected consequence of iPods December 20, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

It seems like it was good fortune that I didn’t end up going for my backup research plan busking for improvement, since I may well have ended up as one of the starving buskers - an unexpected consequence of iPods, according to cybersoc. These guys seem to be alive though:


Pont Saint-Louis, Paris
Originally uploaded by NatachaQS

But really I think Boris Anthony’s comment at Smartmobs may be closer to the real situation:

I think that if there is any truth to this, and that statistically, differences in population ratios accounted for, there are far fewer buskers today than in 1979, a much more realistic culprit is not the media devices but the media culture itself. For most westerners, who are constantly bombarded by highly produced, polished and glossy packaged entertainment, a live musician, let alone one standing on the street asking for change, is at best quaint, at worst an annoyance. The iPod, as the Walkman before it, are merely delivery devices.

People don’t stop to listen to buskers not because they have earbuds in their ears, but because they can’t be bothered with “reality”. It’s like if you’re raised on Coke, green tea tastes awfully bland. :)

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ukcider wiki expands to 500 pubs December 19, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : cider, Wiki , add a comment

ukciderbutton.gif

On 17/12/05, one of the ukcider mailing list members who has got caught up in the quest to find real cider pubs up and down the country wrote in:

> We now have 501 entries in the wiki. The 500th was the Hop Leaf in
> Reading.

I decided this was an occasion to mark, and perhaps slightly prematurely
for the date, have a look back at the progress made and future direction.

“To get to where we are now in just 10.5 months (yes really) is an
impressive achievement by any expectations. The 500 milestone is
significant because it brings the online guide up to a quantity of
information which is comparable with a printed version already. And we
know the potential is there to go way beyond, just with all of those
undiscovered pubs in Devon, Dorset and Somerset.

The next period might look at quality as a milestone somehow.

The existance of this friendly group is the thing which has driven the
cider wiki forward and will no doubt continue to review the pub guide
and make corrections and additions as the situation changes up and
down the country. It’s important to keep that up, but I particularly
like the entries where you can tell that somebody has actually spent
some time inside a pub and mentioned little quirky details. There
aren’t so many of them and I wonder if there’s doubt in some
contributors minds as to what kind of writing is valued? The easiest
thing is always to follow on in the same style as what’s already
there, and perhaps that can lead to a kind of minimalist streamlining
which isn’t strictly necessary.

So I’d like to try and encourage more of the descriptive style
entries, while not at all discouraging the listing of bare facts which
are still much, much better than not getting around to it.

Then there’s the rest of the wiki - it’s not just a pub guide, by any means.
Rich descriptive pages have been added during the year about
importing a Czech fruit mill, Asturian campsites with cider, recipes
and a discussion of the pub sticker idea.

The forthcoming festivals and events page seemed to work quite well,
so 2005 has been hived off and 2006 is starting to fill up already.

Then there are several other pages which are essentially lists, some
of which are valuable resources in the same way as the pub guide, and
others have just begun and then not developed much.

So all in all it’s been a great year for ukcider, with membership of
the mailing list creeping upwards together with the amount of
conversation, lots of good advice and appreciation. I don’t know
what’s in store for us next year, but with any luck it will be more of
the same.

Best wishes to all,
–
Andy Roberts
http://www.ukcider.co.uk

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TA Forum found December 19, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment


After I wrote about the potential for a national Teaching Assistants Community recently, Linda took up this advice

the first thing to do would be to check throughly that there isn’t one already established

and found one.

Teaching Assistants Forum

I Googled for TA forums and didn’t turn up much, TES, and a few others. None of them very active except perhaps socially. However looking through the archives of one of them I found a posting about a new TA forum. This looked quite interesting. It has over 200 members (I was number 200) and it seems to be quite active.

So there it is, then. There’s no need for TAs to setup an email list, just join the existing web forum (and get used to the dancing queens and typing pixies) A possible cycle of DAR to come out of it too, since participatory research in the TA forum may be directly relevant to Linda’s classroom displays project.

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Single-Gender Teaching Experiment December 18, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Action Research , comments closed

While searching for blogs about action research (not just the distributed sort) I found this account from a couple of teachers who experimented with splitting up their combined classes into the boys and the girls. They claim positive outcomes : “nothing short of phenomenal” and they’re obviously aware of the controversy this kind of research has a potential to provoke.

So far we haven’t had any push back from parents or administrators. Our separation is done only twice a week so that may be why no one has complained. My administration is very supportive of action research, so I don’t think that we will have any pressure to cease the practice.

Hypothesising that the two genders may not be identical can be an emotive subject and may become a political hot potato, so the research needs to be founded on good theory. One of the teachers had been to a conference and attended

a fascinating session by Leonard Sax who wrote “Why Gender Matters.” He presented a formidable amount of brain reseach on the differences between boys and girls and its implications for education.

Brain research, hmmm - but that’s what Lozanov and accelerated learning, brain gym are based on as well. Anyway, it’s worth reading the whole article for a number of reasons including just as an account of an action research project in progress and one way to blog it.

TLN Teacher Voices: Our Single-Gender Teaching Experiment

What started as an simple experiment has been so successful that I have now separated the boys and girls in the 5th grade as well with very similar results. I will continue to monitor how this goes and, as Carolyn has said, have decided that this will be my action research project for this year. So I will definitely have more to report in the future.

For those interested in other readings, Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences by Leonard Sax and The Boys and Girls Learn Differently Action Guide for Teachers by Michael Gurian are the two books that I have been reading lately to guide my work.

See also a newsweek article: Boy Brains, Girl Brains
Are separate classrooms the best way to teach kids?

In the last five years, brain researchers using sophisticated MRI and PET technology have gathered new information about the ways male and female brains develop and process information. Studies show that girls, for instance, have more active frontal lobes, stronger connections between brain hemispheres and “language centers” that mature earlier than their male counterparts. Critics of gender-based schooling charge that curricula designed to exploit such differences reinforce the most narrow cultural stereotypes. But proponents say that unless neurological, hormonal and cognitive differences between boys and girls are incorporated in the classroom, boys are at a disadvantage.

Most schools are girl-friendly, says Michael Gurian, coauthor with Kathy Stevens of a new book,”The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life,” “because teachers, who are mostly women, teach the way they learn.

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