AlchemyAPI – Transforming Text Into Knowledge

Stéfan pointed me to the AlchemyAPI service. AlchemyAPI provides an API for extracting “information about people, places, companies, topics, languages” and concepts. They have a nice demo on the front page where they take a news a top news story, extract the entities and then create a spring-loaded graph of the named entities.

You can see that for this story the system found organizations, a city, countries and persons.

A free API key is available for up to 30,000 calls a day.

Craig Mod: Books in the Age of the iPad

Jon pointed me to an online and illustrated essay Books in the Age of the iPad by Craig Mod that makes an interesting argument about the relative uses of digital reading devices like the iPad. He argues that there are two broad groups of content:

  1. Formless Content which doesn’t have a well-defined form. This sort of content can be easily poured into new bottles from iPhones to iPads. It doesn’t matter what form you read it in. (The illustration above is meant to suggest that such content can be poured into print, screen, or moble.)
  2. Definite Content which does have a definite form. The form for such works matters to the content so you can’t easily pour it into a new form. Such content could be designed to be viewed on an interactive screen (and hence it would be awkward to pour it onto print) or it could be designed to be read in paperback (and hence it would be awkward to read it on the screen.)

Mod argues that we should start moving Formless Content to digital devices and in the case of Definite Content we should be willing to leave it on the platform it was designed for. Thus art books should stay on paper while cheap novels should be available also in digital forms for mobile reading.

Contrast this to Dale Salwak’s To every page, turn, turn, turn (Times Higher Education, Sept. 2, 2010), an online essay  with the Times Higher Education bemoaning the loss of “deep reading.” I have no problem with Salwak’s defense of reading and the reading of books, but I’m not sure that there is anything inherently “deep” about books unless by deep he means longer (than essays on the web.) I don’t see why one can’t have a quiet, deep, reading experience off an iPad, though the argument might be made that the iPad has more distractions available. He ends with an argument I haven’t heard before – that books can be your friends (when you don’t have any?)

We all know that a love for books usually starts early in life. If our students come from homes where the predominant sound is the turning of pages, then from our experiences they will hear an affirmation of their own; if, on the other hand, they come from homes in which books are rarely seen, never talked about and seldom read, they may in time feel angry or cheated by their intellectual void. It is our task as educators and adults to provide a model for the reading life and the rewards and insights it can yield.

“Hold on to your books,” I say. “They will help you through. Let them be your best friend, and they will remain a solace in your life as they continue to be in mine.”

Of course today youth find false friends online not between the covers.

Sam Winston : Darwin

I came across an artist, Sam Winston, whose work often explores language. For example Darwin (see image above) compares Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Ruth Padel’s Darwin, A Life In Poems.

Some of the panels/pages in Darwin are visualizations, even if hand drawn.

Many of his other works also play with language and language artifacts like Folded Dictionary.

Lecture Capture: Research on its Effectiveness

Does recording and then podcasting lectures help learning? I always expected it would be a waste of time that might encourage students to fall behind. According to research I am wrong.

From an email newsletter that I like about teaching called Tomorrow’s Professor I learned about a report from the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching on Lecture Capture: A Guide for Effective Use (PDF). The authors, Erping Zhu and Inger Bergom, make some interesting points:

  • There is no evidence that student attend less.
  • Students can concentrate on listening instead of taking notes when there is going to be a podcast posted. This is a good thing – note taking is not learning.
  • Students use podcasts to go over difficult ideas – they can back up and replay. They use captured lectures to review (instead of notes?)
  • Videocasts can be more effective than live lectures because students at live lectures can be distracted by the prof (or others), while with video they can concentrate on the slide.

Until now I didn’t think capturing lectures would be worth it, but watching students slavishly take notes at the expense of learning has always bothered me. Telling students to not take notes doesn’t do any good. If they can count on podcasts or video then they might relax and think about the issues.

Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world

Seth Priebatsch gave an interesting TED talk, The game layer on top of the world. He lists for game dynamics thatcan be used to motivate people.

  • Appointment Dynamic – you have to return somewhere to achieve something
  • Influence and Status – you play to get badges and other indicators of status
  • Progression Dynamic – you have to work up through levels
  • Communal Discovery – people work together to solve problems

He argues that the last decade was the decade of social and the next is the decade of games. He wants us to develop the game infrastructure right and use it for good. Facebook dominates the social by running what is effectively the great social graph that joins us. Do we want a single company monetizing our game layer?

A related project is XPArena – “a learning experience points platform” that allows educators to define points for learning achievements. This lets educators turn things into a game.

Thanks to Peter for this.

JSTOR: Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 23, No. 4, (Dec., 1949)

In 1944 the Journal of Educational Sociology had an issue on “The Comics as an Educational Media”. The Editorial by Harvey Zorbaugh began by quoting Sterling North of the Chicago Daily News who wrote,

Virtually every child in America is reading color “comic” magazines- a poisonous mushroom growth of the last two years. …

Badly drawn, badly written and badly printed – a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems – the effect of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. (p. 193-4)

Zorbaugh and the other authors of the articles collected in this issue are, however, interested in how comics can be leveraged for learning. Zorbaugh ends his editorial with,

It is time the amazing cultural phenomenon of the growth of the comics is subjected to dispassionate scrutiny. Somewhere between vituperation and complacency must be found a road to the under- standing and use of this great new medium of communication and social influence. For the comics are here to stay.

I was struck reading this journal issue how we are going through the same motons with videogames. We have public anxiety about video games, we worry that videogames are violent stimulants, and yet we recognize they are here to stay. Someone gets the bright idea then of trying to create serious games that stimulate the mind, not violence. Academics (like me) follow. Here is the argument from one of the other articles in the issue,

In recent decades, invention and technology have developed motion pictures, the radio, and, latterly, the comic. The first two have already been harnessed to the purposes of education. It is appropriate to examine from the standpoint of educational method this most recently ar- rived entertainment device that has attracted such an extraordinary following. Any form of language that reaches one hundred million1 of our people naturally engages the attention of educationists, whose major activity is communication. (W. W. D. Sones, “The Comics and Instructional Method”, p. 232.)

What then happened to serious comics? I can’t think of any educational comics even though I collected comic books as a kid. Were serious educational comics a failure? If they were, what does that suggest for serious games? It is tempting to say that the lesson of educational comics is that serious games too will vanish as another educational fad. I suspect there are other answers:

  • Perhaps serious comics did work. There were, after all, educational comics like GE’s Adventures in Electricity. Perhaps they were effective educational (and promotional) tools even if never as popular with youth as action comics. Now, of course, we have a wealth of serious graphic novels like Maus by Art Spiegelman.
  • Perhaps textbooks learned from comic artists and began to use graphic elements where they illustrated the point. Many of the books I read my children like those by David Macaulay (Castle, City, Cathedral, and The Way Things Work) were drawn, though they didn’t use all the comic conventions. The comic may have evolved as it got serious.
  • Society eventually finds a way to manage new media. No one thinks comics are poisoning our children any more. Something happened and now comics are not the threat. Hence we don’t need to tame them any more … or perhaps they aren’t the threat because we tamed them?

Internet Archaeology: Whatever happened to GeoCities

Whatever happened to geocities and all those exuberant web pages? It turns out the service, which at one point was the third most popular on the web, was bought by Yahoo! in 1999 and shut down in 2009 (October 26th-7th of 2009.) GeoCities was a Web 2.0 social site before its time. Yahoo! just couldn’t figure out how to make money off it.

One of the things that has happened to GeoCities is that various projects have archived parts of it. Internet Archaeology, for example, has archived the graphic art, the gif animations (like the Welcome above) and even some of the home pages like Welcome to Avalon.

Gamification – Using game mechanics in business

Slashdot pointed me to an interesting article, Play to win: The game-based economy (CNNMoney.com, JP Mangalindan, Sept. 3, 2010) which is about how companies are using game mechanics to generate business.

Chalk it up to basic human behavior, which game makers have been trying to understand and appeal to for decades. The more effective a game resonates with users, the better its sales. The developer’s goal is to design a structure and system of rules in which players will a) enjoy the process or journey, and b) create a sense of added value. As gamers and developers have found, a fun process coupled with a system for incentives or rewards for a job well done can become downright addictive.

So it’s no surprise to some gamers — including yours truly — that the very same game-play mechanics that hook players are slowly wending their way into other parts of the economy, too.

The article lists some interesting examples like Mint.com which turns personal finance into a game or the Nike+ site and  technology.

Stephenson, Subutai, The Mongoliad

Head of a Mongol

Thanks to Slashdot I have been poking around a project that one of my favorite sci-fi authors is involved in, namely the serially online published project The Mongoliad.This work is being supported by a company Stephenson helped create called Subutai Corporation that has developed a platform called PULP for digital novels that have social aspects and multimedia extensions. The platform looks a lot like a structured wiki. The first materials for The Mongoliad are up and smartphone apps are supposed to be coming. I found it hard to read off the web, but I tend to like my sci-fi on pulp.

It will be interesting to see how they explore the medium for this multi-authored novel.

The New York Times has a good story on the project here.