What we need from universities

DeLuca and Rockwell PictureWhat sorts of graduates does Canada need? Bill Gates in a opinion piece At risk: innovation (subscription required) in the Globe and Mail about a month ago argued for more computer science and engineering graduates arguing that our ability to innovate is at risk. This triggered a response, that Technology’s overrated and that what we need are more business students. Frankly I think they are both wrong, we need social content innovation. The innovations of the Web 2.0 (from blogging and wikis to Flickr and YouTube) are not technical innovations, but content innovations involving innovative ways for groups of people to communicate meaningful content. The areas of growth in information and communications technology are those areas that intersect with creative practices like digital imaging and computer games, as the resport Beyond Productivity points out.

What we need are more arts, humanities and social science students who are comfortable with communications technology and curious to use it in interesting ways. We need what Eugene Roman of Bell Canada calls “content scientists”. Companies like Bell have neat technologies, but need people to find ways to use them to create value. Toys are not enough, people need to play with them to give toys meaning and that is what arts, humanities and social science students do. Imagine a world where we made soccer balls but never organized a game – that’s what Gates, Martin and Milway will leave us with. Instead, as Chad Gaffield, the new president of SSHRC, puts it, Canada should support the human sciences which encourage understandings of people and developing talent.

In the picture above, I am with Gerry De Luca of Bell Canada after a meeting between Bell Canada representatives and colleagues at McMaster where we discussed the problems we face in teaching and research. Can we find an appropriate way for an enterprise like Bell to support the development of talented content scientists? What’s in it for them? This is not an easy problem in the content disciplines as industry engagement carries different risks than in science and engineering. When industry supports research in engineering the site of the engagement is a matter of patentable property ownership that is relatively free of controversy. When industry supports the creation of content it is a matter of copyright or expression, something that resists control or ownership. On the one hand there is too much content making most new content worthless; on the other hand content innovation takes freedom and rarely has a commercialization pathway when free. To support innovative expression you have to be willing to risk the tasteless, the controversial, the political, and the just plain bad. What entreprise would want to be associated with a chaotic explosion of content, even if there were a gem or two? Likewise, how comfortable are universities allowing industry engagement in content science.

Ning: Andreessen gets into social networking

The Globe and Mail has a story, Andreessen gets into social networking, on Ning, a “platform” for creating your own social network. It’s like an open FaceBook that lets you create a network for your family or for a class. You can create private or public networks; the public ones are visible and you can join them. You can pay Ning to make money off ads and for other services. Andreessen is, of course, the famous founder of Netscape. (So this is what he is up to now.)

Ning Screen Shot
Ning has a nice simple interface for choosing what you want on the portal. You drag the modules you want to the different columns. It lets you see what you can have and lets you arrange what you want.

State of the Union Visualization

SOTU Visualization ImageBrad Borevitz of onetwothree.net has developed another visualization of language in presidential State of the Union Addresses at State of the Union. He calls it a “data toy” and it combines a number of different graphs. One nice feature is that if you click on one Address and then another the word cloud for the first appears behind (and in red) the second for comparison purposes.

I have blogged other such visualization toys that use the State of the Union Addresses like State of the Union Parsing Tool and the SOTU Rich Prospect Browsing of the New York Times.

Thanks to Nick for this.

We Are Smarter Than Me

We are smarter than me logoWe Are Smarter Than Me is a large scale community writing experiment led by Wharton Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, Pearson, and Shared Insights. They are inviting hundreds of thousands of people to contribute to the writing of a book about “a crucial shift in how businesses operate as they learn to leverage the power of ‘community.'” (Overview) In other words, a community written book about community business.

The site provides an interesting list of applications of community power in business, Community Reference. The Community Proposal page describes the book structures they propose to manage writing.

Thanks to Terry for this.

CNW Group: Mediavantage

Logo for MediavantageThe CNW Group that has it’s Canadian base in Toronto has a new service called MEDIAVANTAGE that has many of the features of a multimedia news crawling, managing, and visualizing service. From the Flash intro it looks like users define keywords to track. Mediavantage then shows you results from different sources. It can send alerts and graphs result history.
Screenshot
The interesting part is that they track TV news and provide text summaries that look like the text off close captioning. Subsets of results can be shared by e-mail and PDF. This is a news mining tool for business that offers a model for what Web Mining for Research might look like.

Thanks to Terry for this.

Web Mining for Research

What’s Web Mining for Research is a white paper I wrote on the TADA wiki trying to define an emerging research practice that draws on the web as evidence of human behaviour. I’m not happy with the phrase, but it hard to know what to call it. Text mining refers to mining large text databases, not the web. Web mining means all sorts of things. What stands out for me as important is that we have in the Web a massive body of evidence for philosophical and cultural analysis, something we haven’t had before. While a chance in evidence may seem trivial, the resulting change in research practices is not.

Plagiarism

Like most profs I have had to deal with plagiarism cases. Over the years I have become convinced that the problem is not the odd cheater, but students who have developed habits. My hypothesis is:

Prepatory colleges in Canada that prepare foreign students for acceptance to Canadian universities are a breeding ground for writing coping tactics. Students who go to these schools unprepared for high school writing in English, learn from their peers a collection of tactics that let them get by. Because of the family pressure to succeed and the short time they have to learn to write in English, they have to avail themselves of these tactics and don’t feel they have the luxury of really trying to write in their own voice. We make matters worse by, on the one hand threatening them with expulsion if caught, and on the other hand offering no real alternative tactics or writing courses with individual attention in the first year. Further I suspect that:

  • Students know that plagiarism is an integrity issue, but are more scared of failure. Even if students don’t understand all the nuances of plagiarism they know they can’t write the way they can in their native language.
  • Students fool themselves by thinking it doesn’t matter for the moment, or that this is what everyone does, or that they will learn it later.
  • We fool ourselves into thinking that it does matter in the work world the way it does to us when, in fact, in many situations a report cribbed off the web that answers questions is good enough. There is even software to support such cribbing, see Net Snippets.
  • Students in this situation don’t trust staff or their professors to help them as they are committed to coping tactics and don’t have the oral communication skills to get navigate help without admitting they are doing something they know is wrong.
  • Students are using a variety of tactics and find it easier to modulate tactics or acquire new ones than to start writing. These vary from collaborating to buying essays.
  • These tactics are successful at getting passing grades on writing assignments.
  • Native English writers are a very different problem and interventions aimed at them won’t work with ESL students. Most plagiarism modules are aimed at native writers.

    • ESL and native writers have realized that in the economics of education it costs under $100 to buy a cust written 5-page paper that will not get caught and will get a B for the assignment. This is less than the cost of textbooks for a course.

In short, with ESL students we are dealing with habits formed before they come to university and habits are not changed the way exceptional behaviour is. Habits are changed by understanding them, understanding the triggers, providing alternative tactics, and motivating students to try alternatives.

A good site on plagiarism is, Assessing Student Learning – five practical guides from the University of New South Wales. PLAGUE is a special interest group based at Monash University who are researching the issue. See their papers and links.