Shirley Williams – This is me

University of Reading

http://thisisme.reading.ac.uk

Digital identity and Reputation

Google search terms. Have you ever googled your name?

How do people display there identity in the digital world?

Material that the participant had posted themselves and maybe forgotten. Material posted by other people that maybe the participant was unaware of.

What has the most impact: “What has most impact: journal cited 10x; blogpost linked 100x; tweet seen 10,000x?”

Should you have separate accounts for separate things?

By products of the this is me project. Used by other universities, re-purposed by nancy whitefor NPO/NGO.

Digital identity us not only about the explicit information but also the implicit which leads to concepts such as online reputation.

Digital identity is like a pension. You always wish you had thought of it earlier

Ian Rowlands – online reading and ‘power browsing’: some interesting questions for e-Research

Department of Information studies, University College London

http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/

Strategic browsing seems to be a similar idea to Information foraging.

Understanding online behaviour trends in scientific reading, Everyone is going through a digital transition.

Reading the tea leaves – deep log analysis.

Strengths of deep log analysis-

• Comprehensive data, no sampling issues
• What people actually did, not what they remember or invent
• Grounded theory no prior assumptions

Weaknesses of deep log analysis-

• Little or no contextual info about task or motivation
• Unit of analysis is usually the session not the individual
• What does it mean? Value judgements inappropriate

What the tea leaves tell us:

• Horizontal information seeking – skimming viewing 1-2 pages of an online sources probably never returning. Speed reading
• Navigation – extended time navigating a site rather than viewing content
• Power browsing- very short dwell time, rapid clicking
• Squirreling behaviour – squirreling away material either by downloading it bookmarking it or cutting and pasting
• Checking – establishing the reliability of information by rapid cross-checking across multiple sites.

How do people actually interact with printed texts, How is the internet changing the way we think?

Is google making us stupid?

Got lots of data and we don’t know what to do with it, or what it means.

Age related difference in information seeking – edit distance and number of searches. Search strings

Confidence in answer and working memory. Strategic reading. Did we ever read sequentially? in the pre online world.

Strategic reading: do scientists recognise themselves?

Scientists have always strived to avoid unnecessary reading. Like all researchers, the use indexing and citations as indicators of relevance abstracts and literature reviews as surrogates for full pages and social networks of colleagues and postgraduate students as personal alerting services. The aim is to move rapidly through the literature to assess and exploit content with as little actual reading as possible. As indexing, recommending and navigation has become more sophisticated in the online environment these strategic reading practices have intensified.

Using log files to analyse users, is like going into a room of artefacts with a candle.

Sara de Freitas: using serious games and virtual worlds to enrich learning, social interactions and create new experiences

Serious Games Institute, Coventry

http://www.seriousgamesinstitute.co.uk/

serious games use gaming technology but to do serious stuff.

Emerging trends by 2011 80% of all active internet users will have an avatar (gartner)

Currently approx 180virtual words (100 aimed at young people)

100% of 6-10 yr old in the uk consider themselves to be gamers.

Several studies demonstrating the efficacy of serious games for training.

Wide uptake of social software, Blurring lines between virtual worlds, games and social software.

Mashups and layering is more and more possible with social software.

How do we measure effective learning?

4 dimensional framework:

Learner specifics (profile, role, competencies), pedagogy (associative, cognitive, social/situtaive), representation and context

Serious games for health : nanomission, Triage trainer

Are virtual worlds changing our spaces? Simulation can be used to push us into places where we would never normally go

So are applications of games and virtual world technologies really changing our approaches to learning, social interactions and how we consider experiences?

Providing new tools for flow, feedback visual and actual realism leading to higher levels of immersion

Great potential for the medium for supporting immersive education through increased motivation and engagement

Convergence of tech virtual world and web 2.0 except one is visual and the other is textual