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links for 2009-06-05

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Set phasers to search, the Next Generation as a metaphor

2009MAR090930
Image by bootload via Flickr

I’ve been trying to get my colleague @clemas blogging, but in the meantime he shares this from one of our infamous corridor chats (follow him on Twitter)

Wolfram Alpha has been described as a “long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.” A difficult task by any standard. But where does this fit into the existing domain of search?

Indeed, do we need a new search engine? Has search come as far as its going to go? A relevant question as few people complain about Google and the relevance of its results. But have we simply become used to what Google offers. Is there more?

The answer is yes. I unashamedly take my inspiration from Star Trek The Next Generation (TNG) that Wolfram Alpha is potentially the final part of the Search Trilogy.

Firstly cast your mid back to the halcyon days when TNG was the epitamy of the Sci-Fi genre. Imagine Commander Data sat at a terminal on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise searching for a key part of information that will solve this weeks Trek mystery.

You can almost imagine the screen, lines of data are passing up the screen at great speed. Picard asks data to include a cross reference to XYZ system. Data does so and the screen suddenly stops on one highlighted record. Data selects it and discovers the solution to the problem.

This is search or semantic search, whichever you prefer. But this is Google.

A different episode sees the crew of the Enterprise travel to a distant mining colony. Communications with the colony have been lost and Picard uses the computer to research the colony before arriving. Picard asks the computer to bring up the details of the colony from the StarFleet database. Slowly Picard reads the entries and in doing so notices something is amiss. What is amiss? Well that’s not for me to say.

This is an Encyclopaedia or an electronic Encyclopaedia. This is Wikipedia

Finally as the enterprise is under attack and travelling at high warp to the closest StarBase Commander Riker shouts at the Enterprises disembodied computer voiced by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry “How far is it to Gamma Station at our current speed?” The computer calmly answers that at the current speed the destination will be reached in “34 minutes and 12 seconds”.

This is voice recognition and importantly the dynamic processing of human requests. This is Wolfram Alpha

So will Wolfram Alpha boldly going it alone? I think not. All three have their important roles to play in how we as humans interact with computers and importantly data. One alone is not the solution. Perhaps in time all three will be combined. Perhaps the day of the Uber Engine is not that far away.

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May 19, 2009 | Filed Under Search engines | Comments 

links for 2009-05-15

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links for 2009-03-10

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Just how do you measure if informal learning happens?

Twitter Friends network map

Twitter Friends network map

One of the things that has made me think about my course project is how to measure what I’m trying to look at: informal learning in social networking services.

One thing I’m very clear on is how much I learn from the brilliant people in my Twitter network. So how can I try to assess and measure what is going on around me?

The basic methodology for my research is to do a case study of a number of users by carrying out a content analysis over a period of time and then map these to the user intention categories outlined in Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities:

I’ve sub divided these categries to try to assess what they are about.

Great, so that gives me content analysis of what is happening with this group of users, but doesn’t offer any idea of whether there is an opportunity for learning to take place.

My tutor Terry King switched me on to George Siemens and his work on Connectivism (and through him I got into the work of all the fab people who were talking about edupunk a while ago), so the idea from my end is to try to map the tweets on to the connectivist model.

This should give me some interesting data to have a look at.

One brilliant thing I have found, and will be testing in a pilot of the coding sheet and service, is using Googledocs forms to create a coding sheet. The thing I love about it is all the responses are poured into a spreadsheet as soon as the reply happens. And given this can be downloaded as an excel file means it is a pretty powerful tool to use.

I’ll blog about the results of that when I’ve finished it.

Then I think a spot of surveying to get some idea of what other people think, and whether my perceptions about Twitter as a great place for informal learning are being shared by others.

And I’m starting to wonder about the number of people who could use respond to a googledocs survey - could be an interesting way forward.

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March 7, 2009 | Filed Under Msc08, elearning | Comments 

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