Inanimate Education

In this week’s blog I am going to look at the use of an interactive, digital novel called Inanimate Alice and if it could work in our national school curricular. Inanimate Alice is a multimedia, interactive fiction novel that engages its audience with the story of a girl called Alice.

Inanimate Alice is described as ‘proven to be popular across a broad range of ages as well as with a broad range of viewers, including both book-lovers and gamers.’-reference from: http://www.inanimatealice.com/teach.html. Inanimate Alice is definitely unique in its presentation of each story that it tells, and will leave an impression on you whether its good or bad it’s truly up to you to decide. ‘Designed originally as entertainment, Inanimate Alice has been adopted by teachers eager to develop their students’ digital literacy skills. Available in French, German, Italian and Spanish and created around a high-quality robust text, the story provides the ideal context for teaching global citizenship and for learning across the curriculum.’- Reference from http://www.inanimatealice.com/about.html. Inanimate Alice seems to be a very use learning resource for all types of languages and maybe even teach a new language, as you could re-run the story again in a different language and understand what it means, as you had already completed it in English.

In terms of being a multi-media program is great as most people today would probably prefer to watch, listen and interact with a story to make them feel more involved and understand it easier rather than just reading off a computer screen.  To progress with the story you have to click on the two arrows move on to the next stage, of the story. That to me happens to be a good feature as it then in turn, allows the student to ‘drive the action forward at their own pace’-reference from http://www.inanimatealice.com/about.html.

In the screenshots presented you can see a sample of what Inanimate Alice has to offer. You can see that in the first screenshot there is text on the screen along with short video clips that interchange with each other and, move across the bottom of the screen. This is a very different approach compared to conventional teaching methods which, seem to just have either video or text not really merging the two together. The second screenshot is a preview of how the interactivity is used in the program as, you are presented with a mobile, and you have to click on one of the icons as if you were using the mobile yourself to progress.

The whole idea of Inanimate Alice is an interesting idea it is really like marmite you either love it or hate it, I say this because of the feedback I receive about it. People either think it’s a genius idea and completely ‘revolutionary. On the other hand, people including myself find it a bit weird and not so easy to understand. Saying that though I don’t take anything away from Inanimate Alice, as it does have a great concept of trying to teach it adds to its unique visualisation of storytelling. And as for thinking if I would add it to the national curriculum here, I would say yes because it seems to have great success in the United States and Australia. In the US Inanimate Alice’s website was awarded ‘Best website for Teaching & Learning 2012’ which obviously shows that actually could work here. Check it out for yourself and see what you think: http://www.inanimatealice.com/index.html.

Tag Your It!

In this week’s blog I am going to look at how Semantic Web is trying to enable ‘users to find, share, and combine information more easily’- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web Reference from Wikipedia. This in turn makes it relatively easier obviously to search things up on the web. I will also be looking at how through tagging various things on the web we are, starting to teach our computers exactly what things are.

Semantic web is an ideal look of what the future may hold for the internet as we know it. By combining information on the web it makes it very easier for, research to happen and allow many of us to share our documents. Data journalism fits nicely into semantic web as; data journalism also links together six different concepts which help research. The following listed areas are referenced from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_journalism:

Computer assisted reporting and data-driven journalism, where journalists make use of large databases to produce stories.

Infographics.

Data visualization.

Interactive visualization.

Serious games, in the sense that they take interaction a step further.

Database journalism or structured journalism, an information management system where pieces of information are organized in a database (as opposed to a traditional story-centric organizational structure).

Data journalism is a like a subsidiary in the Semantic web as there are many ways and factors that make up the method. As we use computers and the internet specifically, we don’t exactly think how it is works but we love to complain when it’s taking its time. For many computers now we use HTML in our web browsers which resort to images and videos being uploaded on to the web. But the computer isn’t able to read the documents; it is just human readable documents.

On the other hand ‘The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or airplane parts.

These technologies are combined in order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents. Thus, content may manifest itself as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases, or as markup within documents (particularly, in Extensible HTML (XHTML) interspersed with XML, or, more often, purely in XML, with layout or rendering cues stored separately). The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e., to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content. In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and helping computers to perform automated information gathering and research.’ Reference from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web.

Using the internet today it is very common to tag things such as photos on social networking sites and, music to a certain genre on YouTube. So semantic web is on the right path making things much easier when looking for certain documents like; photos, video and even web pages. I personally think it is a great way for the web to transition into the new stage of evolving and, I know this would be a great success. Over the past approximately 5 years I have noticed tagging become a major part of our digital culture, for example; tagging of pictures on Facebook etc. So I don’t really find a problem with people having to adjust to any changes if they were to start using semantic web, as it would make research much easier online.  

Wiki What?

In this week’s blog I am going to write about how Wikipedia is a significant for both either good or bad reasons, and how I feel about if overall.

What is Wikipedia? Well “the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.” Reference from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia.  I’m sure that everyone around the world today, that either has a computer or not has an idea on what Wikipedia is.  In 2011 “Wikipedia received an estimated 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States alone.”- Reference from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia. Now that is recognisably a very large amount of people in the U.S. alone using Wikipedia, so I couldn’t even begin to imagine what the sum total is in the World. Wikipedia has to be the most popular open source website in the world and, as it is an open source format, Wikipedia will remain to be frequently updated.

The fact that Wikipedia has the ability to be modified by anyone plus, the capabilities of activating an, entirely new page on anything has been negatively criticised and in return, labelling the site as unreliable and not ideal for research.  People such as Andrew Keen; think that Wikipedia is truly useless and doesn’t have anything factual to offer us, here’s what he has to say about it “The open source encylopedia infantilizes knowledge. On Wikipedia, we all become children, playing at being adult, slipping into an Alice in Wonderland version of reality. If you’re Alice, it might be fun. But for the grown-ups, it is worse than bad.” He obviously feels that with free access to everyone surely there can’t be anyway anyone can possible believe what is actually written on the website. He also thinks that when we are reading things that are on the site we are basically reading a non-fictional book. I see that to be very harsh seeing that we are not forced into reading anything that is posted on the site as well as, generally being right whenever something is searched.

To challenge Wikipedia would be a very, very hard thing to do, as expressed above; 2.7 billion people had used Wikipedia in 2011. So that tells us that it’s obvious that it is very popular around the World therefore, users must be getting the right results when they search to be using it again. I haven’t come across another encyclopaedia in the world that is; as easy to access, covers just about everything in the World, has many different translations for different languages and, is FREE! How I think about open access is that surely if more than one person is thinking to modify something things that are uploaded for factual purposes, can’t be all bad as overall they are trying to help. When things aren’t correct or have been modified for different reasons, the site changes it so it’s not like it can’t be removed.  Wikipedia is updated on a regular basis and keeps up with the new, rather than an encyclopaedia that is old, doesn’t get updated and is not free.

Greedy Authors Deny The World

In this blog I am going to write about what open access and how it benefits certain groups of people more than others. Firstly I have to start off by explaining what open access is, from what I understand. Open access is a movement where “literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” Quote from http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/open_access/about.html. As you read on in the passage it further explains precisely how this program could be used by students just like me to, find out research material such as files and, multimedia files.

I personally think that open access would be great for not just students but also, academics and, professionals such as doctors and nurse all over the globe to help provide them with the latest knowledge and, the easy access of it being available online. It sounds like such a great idea to me and you would have to think why hasn’t it been done yet? Because the writers and the publishers obviously won’t receive any financial gain, clearly doing it out the kindness of their heart isn’t good enough. It could potentially cripple many businesses as they would just be losing money, rather than making it.  Also there could be the case that academics have been used to be writing books in their traditional way for years, so should have to be subject to changing they’re techniques for others benefit? Also adding to that could be that maybe academics just don’t understand how it would work on a whole. As I mentioned they have been used to doing something a certain way for so long, that maybe it might not be as easy to change their style. To be fair they aren’t going to benefit financially and, they don’t have to do it people still do buy millions of book across the world still even, with the internet available.

Also there are many ways to maintain copyright laws whilst still being in the supervision of the Open Access. One example I found is this “One easy, effective, and increasingly common way for copyright holders to manifest their consent to OA is to use one of the Creative Commons licenses. Many other open-content licenses will also work. Copyright holders could also compose their own licenses or permission statements and attach them to their works (though there are good reasons not to do so without legal advice).” This is a great quotation I found from this website: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm this website also includes many other bullet points that are extremely relevant and gives a good overview on, how Open Access would work if available. As explain in the quotation copyrights might not be such a big deal as there are many laws today, which essentially cover any concerns about copyright laws.

On a whole as I am a university student I am obviously going to agree that Open Access would be a great thing as many people also studying would agree. I find it very strange that something as good as this cannot be simple constructed