Today truna held a seminar in HUMlab about technology in education. She talked about the dangers of invisible interfaces – how they make it difficult for the user to be able to analyze the philosophical and political goals of the designers as well as the effects of the mediated text on you as a reader. truna also touched upon communication interfaces, and one very interesting point she made regards the ways in which online communication has always been modelled on telephone conversation. This is one of the issues Iím planning on developing further in my own research: in what ways can technology allow for new innovative ways of communication based on new conceptual models? truna is a very inspiring speaker and I recommend you to check the stream of her seminar out (can be found on HUMlabís webpage)

Today we had the grand opening for the new ITAS’ world in Adobe Atmosphere. I’m really excited about the possibilties that this space offers. It will provide the members of the network with great opportunities to display projects etc. In here you (supposedly) can show flash, powerpoint and streamed media, plus you can communicate via text chat (today we had a stream running of Jim Barrett, the world builder, talking about his creation). Interested in visiting the place? Let me know.

I always claim that blogs are the perfect tool for easy web publishing, and so I did today as I held my course in HUMlab. Things went fine while we were making use of the group blog that I had created ahead of time, but when the students were to create blogs of their own, we ran into a few problems. One important feature of the blog, as I see it, is the use of comments to be able to create networks of ideas. We made use of Blogger for this course, since it is free and relatively easy to use. However, it doesn’t include a comment feature, and you need to go into the template and change the code to be able to make use of comments. I knew of this, and had included a few links in the group blog for websites with the code for the comment feature. In addition, if you want to add links to the sidebar, you also have to change the code in the template (this is true for Moveable Type, which I’m using, as well). Imagine a group of humanist students who have never created a web page, not even with a web publisher, suddenly being confronted with the (to them) complex looking html code. In fact, only two student groups found it worth the effort to try and figure out where to embed the code in the template. I probably would have been able to give better instructions for how to embed the code, but still, if you want to use blogs with for instance a high school class, you canít expect those students to be able to do html code. I would expect similar reactions from them as the ones I got from todayís course participants (probably less polite, though ñ todayís course participants were very polite), that is, frustration and fear of trying, because it looks far too difficult (I have come to learn that it isnít as difficult as it looks, coming from a similar background myself). So, what I am arguing here is that blogs cannot be referred to as easy web publishing tools until interfaces are developed guaranteeing that you never have to enter the template unless you want to personalize the appearance of your blog, and preferably not even then. (If you know of an already existing, preferably free blogging tool that works this way, please let me know!) This might be due to technology development not keeping up with the fast spread of new uses of blogs, also among people not normally concerned with web publishing. But I canít help to wonder if it might also be a conscious strategy to exclude certain people from the blogosphere: ìIf you don’t even know how to use html, why bother?

In the Moblogging Jokkmokk blog I raised the question whether someone knew of a good (and preferably easy-to-use) device to use for multi-medial moblogging. Daniel replied (in a comment to one of my posts about the Jokkmokk event in this blog) and suggested that I try using Opera on a Nokia 6600… Erik (MyMarkup) has written (in Swedish) about how the moblogging functions for TypePad and Moveable Type will be updated to make it possible to post video and audio from your cell phone… The one he’s suggesting is Treo600.
Anyone interested in researching the affordances of moblogging in search for a person to test the equipment? Just let me know, and I’d be happy to help …

Sometimes googling for qualitative sites drives me crazy. Iíve spent my evening searching for project blogs used in history education, and have found none (zero, zip, nada ñ neither good quality, nor bad). However, I did find a blog dealing with history, education and ICT, The Open History Project Blog . It definitely looks promising, and the web page to which it is linked includes lots of information and links. Other more general blogs dealing with blogging in education are Weblogg-ed and The Educational Bloggers’ Network (these I didn’t find on Google, but they have been part of my reading list for some time). They might also be of interest to tomorrow’s teacher candidates. I also found general websites with resources for ICT and history education. Some examples are History Resource and History and ICT. I hope those sites can prove valuable for the participants in the course. Another interesting project that I will mention tomorrow is the Klara project, where ìThe Historical Laboratoryî (web page in Swedish) has rebuilt a section of Stockholm in ActiveWorlds to look the way it did in 1899. Here students can embody an avatar and explore for information/give virtual presentations. I definitely should learn how to make my internet searches more effective in order to avoid putting time and effort into useless endeavours (okay, I did find some interesting sites, but not what I was searching for). It would also spare me and my dear ones from the type of frustration Iím experiencing at the momentÖ

Tomorrow it’s time for me to give another course with suggestions for how to use computers and the Internet in education. This time the participants will be teachers’ ed. students majoring in history. I will focus on some theory on creative learning, and examples will be shown from virtual environments and blogs. Throughout the course we will make use of a group blog in which all participants can write during the theory session (a strategy which worked as a good introduction to the concept of blogging in my last course on blogs), and the final task will be for the students to create blogs of their own. Should be exciting!

If any of you have suggestions for blogs on history/education that I could show(perhaps an educational project?), please let me know!

Today’s HUMlab seminar is on spoken dialogue systems – speech interaction between human and computer. Linda Bell of Telia Sonera talks about their research and discusses problems and possibilities with this technology. Some of the main problems she recognizes are to do with the way in which computers lack knowledge about natural patterns of interaction. She quotes Grice (1975) saying that “language often [is] used to express more than what is literally being said” and claims that it is problematic for the computer to understand that “surface form doesn’t correspond to illocutionary force”. One example of this is a phrase like “could you pass me the salt?”, which is a polite way of saying “pass me the salt”, something which a computer might not understand. Prosody and pragmatics/world knowledge seem to be the most difficult skills to “teach” spoken dialogue systems.

Another interesting question which Bell raises is whether we really do want spoken dialogue systems to become too human-like? Bell argues that on a linguistic level this is the goal, but that it may be a bit more controversial on other levels. Is it ethically defendable to let people think that they are talking to a human being when they are actually talking to a computer? Or do we want systems with artificial voices so that we can distinguish them from human speakers?

Bell also talks about multimodal interfaces as being a good way of complementizing voice interaction. Other than voice the following modes can be used: gaze, posture, gesture, pen and touch. Different modalities are useful for different things and help facilitate error handling which occurs in speech recognition.

The seminar is live streamed at this very moment, but you’ll also be able to access the stream later from HUMlab’s webpage (the seminar is in English).

Our Jokkmokk adventure is about to begin! Tomorrow, Anton, one of the team members will get up really early and take the bus up there (8 hour trip) to start setting the technology up. The rest of us will leave Ume by car later in the afternoon/evening. Right now we are trying to solve some practical issues, and Stephanie is working hard to get the blog the way we want it. The actual blogging will start on a small scale tomorrow evening in the car, and at the opening ceremony of the market we hope to be all set to start filling the blog with multi-media content. There seems to be interesting activites taking place almost constantly, so be prepared for updates around the clock. Exciting!