I'm down to do a 15 minute slot on Tuesday at a scoping meeting for a new second level course, where the discussion will be on possible subject matter for each of the course blocks. One of the possible major themes for the course harkens back to a previous course - T293 Communicating Technology - which mixed the development of communication skills (presentations, teamworking, reading skills, and so on) with teaching about the technical side of telecommunication systems.
One of the areas I think we should be considering is data visualisation and interpretation. Thinking about how to make that argument, I got a sidetracked (!? - no surprise there, then ;-) with a more general view, relating to how we might start develop the use of digital media use and skills development in our courses.
The format of this piece is - as regular readers will have noticed - heavily influenced by We ignore RSS at OUr Peril. It contains several embedded movies. If you are reading this through a feed reader, it's quite likely the movies won't appear - click through to see them. They help make sense of the story I want to tell...
[UPDATE: if you would rather watch a version of the following part of the post as a movie, rather than read through it/watch the embedded movies, tune in to the We Ignore Digital Media at OUr Peril Splashcast show.]
When T293 finished presenting three or four years ago had it's last presentation in 2001, let alone when it started, the democratisation of affordable and wide reaching technologies capable of producing and distributing rich media had hardly begun. At the T293 course residential school, an OHP was the way we presented our slides to students, and the way students made presentations to each other. Data projectors were still cumbersome and expensive and Powerpoint presentations, let alone the use of interactive whiteboards, had not made it into the course. Both of these technologies are now a mainstay of Primary School ICT education here in the UK.
Powerpoint per se will not, of course, guarantee a successful presentation...
.... although in the right hands, it can be a highly effective visual aid reinforce the presenter's message.
(If you want to know just how to do that sort of presentation, here's a clue: Powerpoint presenter view and dual monitor displays. For more on why you should only use small amounts of text on a presentation slide, check out Powerpoint Presentations That Support Glanceability.)
To get an idea of just how wide ranging presentation styles can be, check out SlideShare.
Whether slides are any use after the fact is another matter...
We ignore digital presentation tools at our peril.
When T293 finished presenting three or four years ago had it's last presentation in 2001, there were no social networks that had the popular reach of MySpace, Bebo, or Facebook. (If you have young kids - ask them about Club Penguin.) Want "proof"? You got it. ["Proof by Google" ™ ;-)]
There are - at the time of posting - one thousand five hundred and eighty members of "The Open University" group on Facebook.
If you haven't been listening, Facebook is making a play as a platform, trying to create a social network ecosystem in the way that the Amazon and eBay platforms have built ecosystems around retail and auctions (and like UPS has built a supply chain platform, come to that...).
If you don't know what a platform is, WAKE UP.
We ignore social networks and social technology platforms at OUr peril.
When T293 finished presenting three or four years ago had it's last presentation in 2001, there were no large scale, easy to use sites for uploading and sharing personally generated media. No real photo sharing in the Flickr-style, no movie sharing sites like youTube. Want "proof'? You got it.
Photo editing and video editing tools were barely available offline, let alone online, and the thought of being able to remix "the source audio" of a commercial album using your own computer's preloaded mixing desk - think Nine Inch Nails' Garageband release - was virtually unimaginable.
Now it's possible to "do" digital storytelling using the tools you can find via your browser.
Err - digital storytelling??? Things like this, maybe:
Okay - so that's slick - but you can always use something like Scratch, which does interactive games as well as simple multimedia animations.
We ignore "digital storytelling" at OUr peril.
When T293 finished presenting three or four years ago had it's last presentation in 2001, satellite television - and a few struggling cable TV companies - were the only alternative to the four (then five) free-to-air broadcast television channels in the UK. Digital radio was still in it's early days (and if truth be told, I suspect is still far from mainstream and further from exploiting its full potential).
Last week, I got an invite to the BBC Archive Trial, which offers a glimpse into the BBC back catalogue; I already dabble with Channel 4 On Demand. ITV have just started rolling out their online watch again service too, and BT are now getting into on-demand film delivery.
Then there are the pure internet plays too, of course: Joost and Babelgum, for example.
Want "proof"? Proof by Google ™.
We ignore the changing nature of video distribution and consumption at OUr peril.
Didi I mention audio?
The BBC Listen Again service provides access to a wide selection of radio content for seven days after it is broadcast, making home-taping unnecessary for 'listen once' activity if you can get to a browser within a week of a programme being broadcast. Many radio programmes and TV news clips also seem to be made available in perpetuity. You can even edit some radio programmes and deep link into them using the Find, Listen, Label tool.
Services like iTunes and last.fm, amongst others, demonstrate how offline and online audio consumption and distribution can be grown - and supported - purely via the internet. When T293 finished presenting three or four years ago had it's last presentation in 2001, there was nothing around like either of these services.
We ignore the changing nature of audio distribution and consumption at OUr peril.
When T293 finished presenting three or four years ago had it's last presentation in 2001, computer gaming was HUGE, commercially. It still is.
As the mainstream engages in games that aren't - from Second Life through "flow" to serious games - the culture surrounding gaming continues to grow, and the storyforms and methods of gameplay employed in games become entrenched in everyday pop culture.
"We" may "get" short stories, novels, two and three act plays, opera and ballet, maybe even abstract expressionism. But can you identify a game genre and the expected mode of gameplay at 50 paces in front of a hi-def, 40 inch plasma screen? Would you even begin to know what's expected of you as a player?
Oops - I forgot - games are interactive, and we do education... We just pour that knowledge into those empty vessel brains, don't we?
We continue to ignore computer gaming and interactive entertainment at OUr peril.
The world is increasingly awash with data. There is no way we can "explain it" all to our students. Instead, we need to find ways of helping OUr students explore data, mine it themselves, have conversations with it directly, and with each other about it.
The OU was one of the pioneers at an institutional level of the idea of the tutorial in print, engaging students through print material as if in they were in conversation with a tutor sat next to them.
In order to help OUr students make sense of data, we need to help them use the tools that allow them to ask questions of that data, and obtain appropriately visualised results in return.
Gapminder is one such beautiful (online) tool for visualising population and economic data.
Because I know most of you won't follow that link, here's an exquisite presentation showing Gapminder in action. The Gapminder demo starts 2.45 minutes in. I could deep-link to that point, but then you'll miss the first couple of minutes which set the scene about WHY this sort of display technology is so important...
Social discussion around data is important too, particular in an educational context. IBM's Many Eyes shows one possible way forward here. It not only provides a place to share data, it always provides a wealth of visualisation tools and social tools to rate and discuss visualisations.
We ignore the importance of developing data visualisation skills at OUr peril.
The web is a visual place (although it is also becoming an increasingly important channel for the delivery audio files). In academia, we tend to emphasise textual representations.
Assessment is dominated by textual submissions from our students, partly because we do not tend to develop visual presentation skills.
The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods demonstrates a wide variety of graphical techniques for communicating information.
It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. How brave would a course team have to be to introduce a final assessment that required the submission of two infographics or a two minute digital story, rather than a couple of thousand words in reply to short and long question answers?
We ignore the development of visual communication skills at OUr peril.
Space is important too - we live in a 3D world and are familiar with how 3D works. Spatial relationships affect how we live out our daily lives. Geography is important. And geography is coming to the data web.
If you haven't heard of RSS feeds (which you ignore at your peril), you probably won't have heard of geoRSS. (If you want to know what it is, Google or Wikipedia will tell you about it... That's where most of the rest of the world learn about the stuff they need - err, think they want? - to know about...)
Here's a map that's powered by GeoRSS: English Civil War battles. Using a service like the GeoNames RSS to GeoRSS converter, I can create another sort of file - a KML file - that will display the battlefield locations in Google Earth.
You can also add 3D models to Google Earth using Sketchup, of course, though at the moment, you have to pay to record movies made inside Google Earth if you don't want to use screen recorder software.
If you liked that, then you'll love PhotoSynth, which stitches photos together to give photorealistic (indeed, photo generated) 3D models.
On the other hand, Fotowoosh will create a 3D model from a single photo. Remember Bladerunner? Here's a walk inside a photo for real:
The 3D web is coming, and it's not just Second Life...
We ignore the 3D web at our peril.
Undeniably, rich digital media surrounds us - as do the tools of its production.
"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."
OUr mission - should we choose to accept it - is to redistribute that future.
We ignore digital media at OUr peril.
Okay - so that's turned out to be a bit more than 15 minutes worth of stuff - but it was fun to compile...
Now I just to use the above as resources for a bit of digital storytelling...
Posted by ajh59 at June 24, 2007 08:00 PM