InfoMatters

Indiana University’s School of Education has received a federal grant of $3m to study how technology is used in the classroom and to what effect. Am pleased there will be more data on this since some of us have conducted significant reviews over the last decade that raised serious doubts about the claims made for improved learning through hypermedia tools. What’s surprising with this latest award are the comments to the effect that this is the first national study of the topic. According to an investigator leading the project “No national study has ever been undertaken to figure out how teachers use technology in lessons and how students learn from that technology” Can it be so? After decades of proclaiming the benefits, of pushing a technological agenda for classrooms, of soliciting millions of grant dollars to support new learning environments, of gaining tenure on the basis of papers and books espousing the power of hypermedia to enhance the construction of meaning, educational researchers are now saying there’s never been a national study of this? And are we to presume that a national study is somehow better or more authoritative than well-designed studies on a class, state or multi-state level? Or is it the case, as some of us pointed out a decade ago, that any well-controlled studies of the effects of technology on learning are pretty scarce in the trendy world of educational research.

Two news stories breaking today point to the range of information issues in contemportary life. First, researchers at CIT and UCLA have developed a super dense computer chip that is the size of a white blood cell, opening the door to another level in computational design. Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange is adopting new technology that will lessen the need for traders to jump about, shouting and jostling, in return for a quieter, PDA-enabled process. Today, the exchange officially goes paperless (heard that one before?). The links between these stories will not be made often but these are related events, representing possible extremes of enquiry for those interested in information related issues. Is the ability to draw these relationships meaningfully a measure of the information field’s value or should we just consider these two very different events?

If you’ve dabbled in online auctions or sales you will no doubt have wondered just how reliable are the various reputation ratings sellers report to convince you of their integrity. Interesting news this week from researchers at CMU who report that fraudsters in online auctions and selling sites can be reliably identified by the pattern of behaviour they reveal (tinyurl.com/yyr32m). The key seems to be identifying link patterns between group members, with fraudsters tending to display a clear pattern of communicating more with members in another group than the group of legitimate buyers and sellers on the site. This ‘bipartite core’ which can be clearly seen when the various transactions are plotted as a graph seems to be a strong indicator of the perpetrator working with accomplices to maintain a clean record on the original site while engaging in fraud with partners. The precise details are not yet revealed but most interesting is the emergence of this type of behavioral index from a massive data set using data mining techniques. What other indices of human behavior are out there to be uncovered is intruiging to consider. With Ebay reporting over 200 million registered users, the problem of small N for behavioral research might just start to appear quaintly old-fashioned.

So now it’s over, and while for many in the US it was all a bit hard to understand, for the rest of the world this competition is the highlight of the sporting calendar. Forget the results however, there were several fascinating informational aspects to this year’s cup that should be noted. Leaving aside the quaint refusal of soccer authorities to employ video technology to help decision making for penalties and goalmouth clearances while allowing referees for the first time to sport earpieces to hear the off-field official provide another perspective, this was really the World Cup where the web shaped the tournament.

The BBC ran a number of blogs and discussion lists that had huge traffic. When England lost (again) to Portugal the conversation turned more than a little unpleasant as the more rabid fans blamed ‘Johnny Foreigner’ for all kinds of cheating that of course took away all the blame from the English team (but not their manager who as a Swede could be conveniently pilloried). Chief culprit was a talented Portugese named Christian Ronaldo. His crime was not that he scored the winning penalty (that would be too obvious) but that he supposedly led to England’s star turn, Wayne “Nice Boy” Rooney being sent off. Leaving logic aside (Rooney had landed his foot in the most sensitive area of another Portugese player’s anatomy resulting in a red card), Ronaldo soon became the “cause” of this dismissal (in the mind of some) because he complained about it to the referee. The ref claims this had nothing to do with his decision but before you knew it a hate campaign had been launched on the web. When FIFA put out a poll for votes on the Young Player of the Tournament, Ronaldo was a favorite given his performances. Soon the various football sites were full of messages telling people to vote against him with the result that within two days his lead was slashed and a lesser known Ecuadorian (whom most people could not name) was the top vote. FIFA, with cunning insight, spotted the problem and gave the award to another player entirely, but that’s another story. Result: Smart Mobs 1-0 Fair Play.

But of course, even as the threats to Ronaldo took on such a toxic tone that he even spoke of leaving his club in England to get away from the hostility (I kid you not), we have Zidane, also known now as “Zid Vicious”, claiming spoken insults about his family pushed him over the edge in the final. Again, the ref did not see the headbutt but TV cameras did and showed it repeatedly. Various channels then proceeded to bring in lip-reading experts to decipher what is was that Italian defender really said to him. Of course, just like consultants, put two in a room and you get three opinions, there was zero agreement between the various ‘experts’ and both players are not revealing exactly what was said but you get the idea — one moment of insanity in your life and thanks to technology it can all be captured, replayed and analyzed for years. Now wasn’t this one of the big exciting ideas that a new sexier CS was promising us? And the result?….oh, soccer lost.

There is much interest in attracting new students, especially female, to computer science and it has not gone unnoticed by some in that discipline that there is a real image problem. The Computer Research Association, a grouping of some 200 academic departments in computer science and engineering, is doing its best to put the sex appeal back in CS (you mean it was once there?) by inviting anthropologists to give keynotes at their conference (the wonderful Genevieve Bell of INTEL (www.intel.com/technology/techresearch/people/bios/bell_g.htm) who spoke here at the iSchool two years ago) and trying to sell the message that not only can CS give you a high paying job but it really does deal with exciting ideas. Check out the reports from this year’s CRA gathering at: www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/, particularly the accounts of Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research’s address where he argued that there was much excitement still awaiting the CS profession.

I don’t dispute any of this but I would note that the three projects listed as exemplars of wonder are:

–Using any surface as a computing interface
–Human scale storage, where all one’s actions and conversations can be recorded
–Terra scale applications such as mapping the sky and giving multiple attributes to each object

These have real potential for excitement but how much of that stems from the computational aspects that must be solved or from the human and social factors that such innovations might invoke. Unless CS incorporates the necessary methods and theories to handle those aspects then it’s hard for me to get terribly excited. And if CS did incorporate these, then would it still be computer science (and no jokes please about any discipline with ’science’ in its name not being a real science)?

The serious point here (other than growing the recruitment of more and better balanced student cohorts) is what type of knowledge does it take to deliver successful outcomes for such projects? In my view there is no single discipline that could really tackle one of these three wonder projects successfully, only a multi-disciplinary approach could work. Since we tend to divide up universities into discrete disciplines and put buildings around them to keep outsiders from infiltrating their ranks, there seems to be a problem here. What would it take to create a truly new intellectual space to end the isolation at universities? I think the answer to that is far more important to think about than any specific wonder project and the information school movement might be the appropriate vehicle for trying out potential solutions.

Just back from CHI in Montreal (great city, so-so conference) I noticed how many people on the airplane were reading the Da Vinci Code. On both sides of the aisle I saw fellow-passengers with copies, and a third with another Dan Brown book. As if this was not bad enough, the O’Hare bookstore in which I wiled away a few minutes had more books on gospel secrets, hidden meanings and symbols than you could shake an author’s advance at. The worst yet has to be a new book on losing weight by using the secrets of Da Vinci and the golden ratio. Now, I will not put a link in here - the book will get enough publicity without me but this has to take the prize for the most crass exploitation yet (and as soon as I write this I just know there will be worse to come). Warner, in announcing the new series, said the book is sure “to pique the interest of Da Vinci enthusiasts and weight-loss seekers alike.” Imagine!

Now I’ve read the Da Vinci Code (yes, I am annoyed with myself but I couldn’t help it) and as far as I can tell, the only secret to losing weight it contained was to have yourself chased around Europe by a self-flagellating member of a murderous religious order - that ought to do it. Who needs a book? But the real point here is that I have heard people referring to our latest epoch as the Creativity Age (information being so last year). Well, I suppose if we consider technology to have enabled rapid repurposing and repackaging of one basic idea then it’s true –but if you quaintly thought creativity implied something ‘new’ emerging then I guess we’re still in the information age for now. Phew…..