The tech vision video for project glass was released today. The technology looks interesting, if a bit creepy.
But what hits me is that this isn’t about augmenting your reality. It’s about augmenting google’s documentation of everything you do, so they can mine it to sell to advertisers. The implications of a service actively monitoring and interacting and documenting and monetizing everything I do and say are just mind boggling.
I've been pretty mindful about avoiding trackers on my site. I don't use an external web analytics package (I do have the apache logs, crunched by AWStats, but nothing anywhere near the level of a Google Analytics or even WordPress Stats tracking). But, websites connect to other websites. That's kind of their job. And other websites track stuff. So, even a website that doesn't directly track people, by using YouTube videos and other hosted media, exposes people's activity to those who track them.
I've been playing around with gephi today, to see what I could come up with to display the discussion threads from my research data. Lots of manual data entry later, and I've got this:
and this:
WordPress sites are shown in red, Blackboard discussion forums in blue. So far, just a pretty picture, but I'll hopefully be able to coax out a diagram or two that shows the difference in interaction patterns between the two platforms...
It's fashionable to rail against the LMS, to lament the shackles of institutional constraint and to advocate for abandoning the concept in exchange for a DIY nirvana. There's definitely something to the no-LMS movement, because it emphasizes individual control and grassroots innovation. But, there is also a role for the LMS in higher education. If for no other reason than the simple reality that most instructors, and many students, aren't ready, willing, or able to forge their own solutions. Nor should they be required to. The DIY hobby craftsperson ethos is inspiring, but institutions have an obligation to provide tools to enable their faculty, students and staff. The LMS is only part of that - but I think it is a core part.
I just put together some quick network maps for the online discussions from my thesis research data. Haven't done any analysis - just some purty pictures to see any at-a-glance differences:
Both discussion platforms had about the same number of posts and responses, but the pattern of connections is markedly different for some reason...
here's a quick look at the aggregated metadata for all of the online discussions I'm using in my thesis:
About the same number of posts in each platform, with a bit more of a time-spread in the WordPress discussions, substantially longer posts in WordPress, about the same (non) use of images, more links in WordPress posts, and more attachments in Blackboard posts.
Here's a quick pass at analyzing the basic metadata for the online discussions.
I plotted a few calculated values (Excel pivot tables fracking ROCK, BTW...), to try to compare activity patterns. What's interesting in this graph is the average wordcount (green line) - low for the Blackboard discussion board threads (the left 5 items) and markedly higher for the 8 student blog (the right 8 items).
I've finally entered all of the metadata information for the online discussions I'm using in my thesis. This includes the person who posts something, the date, and the size of the post. I worked through my earlier visualization mockup, and wanted to try it with the full set of data. So, here's the Blackboard discussions (top image) and WordPress blog posts (bottom image):
For my MSc thesis research, I'm working with a bunch of data collected through online discussions during a blended course. Part of the discussions took place using Blackboard's discussion board feature, part took place on students' blogs. One of the things I need to do is to document how the discussions played out, to try and tease out any differences between the two venues. I'll be using the Community of Inquiry model to describe the social/teaching/cognitive components of posts, but I've been wanting to describe the flow of discussion as well. How do the discussions occur? Are there patterns of activity, in time or size of responses? I've been struggling with how to document these. In my thesis, it's really just a glorified case study, so I've had to constantly force myself to stop thinking of it as controlled experimental data. What I'm doing is describing the activity within a single course, in 2 venues of online discussion.
Xin, C. (2012). A Critique of the Community of Inquiry Framework. The Journal of Distance Education, 26(1). Retrieved from http://www.jofde.ca/index.php/jde/article/view/755/1333
Thanks to Stephen Downes for pointing this paper out. I’m up to my eyeballs, processing data for my Community of Inquiry based MSc research, and could have missed this.
The Community of Inquiry model provides a framework for describing interactions within a community or classroom environment. It involves using textual analysis and coding of messages to interpret the type of interaction for each message – whether it involves social, teaching, or cognitive components. As I’ve been coding the data for my thesis, I’ve been adding as many types of “presences” as are appropriate – a message may include a number of things, indicating social, teaching and cognitive presences in a non-exclusive manner. I’m imagining each message having its own little Venn diagram for Social/Teaching/Cognitive component, as per the CoI model. It’s a simplification and abstraction, certainly, but looking at the coded output, I think it’s still got a fair bit of fidelity to describe the interactions at a high level. In my data, I’m also adding coding to describe the type of content (links, images, attachments, embedded media, etc…) as well as how involved the message is (is it a simple one-liner? a 2 paragraph response? a multi-page essay?) – and I’m thinking about how to include data on the timeline of the discussion (how rapid were the responses? staccato rapidfire conversation, or long drawn-out periods of silence?) I’m still thinking about how to represent that kind of data for an online discussion, but I think there’s something there, there.
I didn't get copies of the photos from the borrowed camera until just recently, and just finished going through and editing. This is the first wedding I've ever shot, with any sense of responsibility for capturing the whole thing. Lots of rookie amateur mistakes in there. It's amazing how fast things happen in a wedding, when you're trying to capture it all. And how quickly the lighting goes south - the wedding took place on a beach, just before sunset, so we had amazing light for most of it, and then harsh oblique shadows at the end. I didn't have any lights aside from the on-camera flash, so things got messy in a hurry. Thankfully, I pumped off about a thousand frames - whittled down to 80-something.