Last week I saw a tweet about Kwercus, a secure social networking site for schools. I did a search to find out some more, but there wasn’t a whole lot out there. So I sent out a question on Twitter, hoping that someone who knew a bit more would provide a link to more info, but no response.
As my tweets are displayed on my blogs, I’ve noticed over the weekend that others are interested in finding out about Kwercus as I’ve been receiving hits from others also searching for more info. So today I’ve done a little bit more work and this is what I’ve found.
Kwercus will be a secure system, based on the internet, but managed by teachers.
The company behind it hopes the site will be used as a learning resource for pupils, parents, and staff, as well as somewhere for young people to have fun.
Kwercus is due to launch in 2010.
The company behind the software is imJack PLC and they are working with the child psychologist, Professor Tanya Byron who is acting as an advisor. I’ve found the web site relating to Kwercus, though there doesn’t seem to be all that much information available on there at the moment.
But there is a video on Vimeo that went up three days ago from the time I’m writing this. It’s an hour long panel session that includes Prof Tanya Byron and also a student. There is some interesting discussion about the current use of social networking amongst children, who are below the minimum age required for registration under their terms and conditions. Also, how children are using these networks, and why. In addition, there is some talk about the benefits of using social networking with children within schools. There is also some talk about online bullying, and how this needs to be address, along with development of digital lieracy.
There are a few images around about what the environment looks like:
I came across The Filing Cabinet recently, a resource by Kelly Hines categorizing by child age and subject links to useful educational resources. I don’t want to concentrate on that right now, I’ll cover it in more detail on my SpottyBlueBanana blog.
What I do want to highlight here is the concept of using a Glog as a front end graphical index for content. It’s such a good idea – ingenious Kelly. Each image item on the Glog acts as a link to the specific category. The Glog can then be embedded in the front end of the site as a visual index. You could use icons instead of text as the visual cues, these could then run throughout the site for consistency.
I’ve been a fan of Glogster for some time and have written about it before, but such a use hadn’t occurred to me. I’ll be using the idea in the future.
It’s the start of anti-bullying week. It’s important that children feel safe both on- and off-line and the BeatBullying campaign sets out to ‘Shape attitudes and change behaviour’ relating to how children act towards one another. Complementing BeatBullying is the Cybermentors.
Taken from the CyberMentors site:
CyberMentors is here to support all young people affected by bullying. If you’re being bullied, or perhaps there’s something else that’s bothering you and making you feel rubbish, and you’re not sure what to do or who to talk to, then CyberMentors is where you can go for help. It doesn’t matter how big or small you think the problem is, or whether you’re being targeted online or offline, CyberMentors are here to listen and support you.
If you want to talk about a problem you’ve got with bullying (whether you’re being bullied, whether you’ve seen it and don’t know what to do, or whether you’re actually bullying someone else and want to stop), just drop a CyberMentor a message, or ask to chat to them online. You can find their profiles on the left.
CyberMentors are young people who have been trained in their schools, and are supported by senior CyberMentors at college or university, whilst trained counsellors are also on hand if necessary.
Any child having problems with bullying can contact a mentor via the Cybermentor site to chat about their concerns.
In Japan there seems to be a craze for creating artwork for mobile phones, as the majority have something called FlashLite running. Investigating this a little has termed up festivals relating to ‘Pocket Films’, the creation of video specifically for mobiles; the synchronizing of art between two phones to give a sense of connectedness between partners, Hanbunko; and a ‘concept’ from the Mobile Art Lab that combines the iPhone with a book to create
TED, which stands for Technology, Education and Design, though the scope has broadened out over the years, is undoubtedly the most significant site of its kind. It hosts a multitude of categorized videoed presentations by respected people from all kinds of fields covering a host of topics. TED has the taglines “Ideas worth spreading” and “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world“. If you’ve never seen it, I thoroughly recommend spending some time investigating it in much more detail. I’ve been using it for some years.
FORA.tv is a similar site to TED. It too has videos of presentations, and discussion, given by noted people. Its tagline is “Fuel the Enlightenment“. I was rather pleased when I stumbled upon it. Also worth spending some time browsing the content.
I recently caught the end of a BBC Radio 4 programme called Aping Evolution (potentially only available to listen to for a limited period). It was the second in a series of two programmes.
It was an interesting and thought-provoking piece, which I want to highlight a few points from.
Firstly, a point was discussed about at what age people decide to have children, and how this can be quite different within a UK city; a matter of a mile apart the average age that a woman decides to have children might be 21, whereas a mile down the road it could be 31, and that is a significant difference. A large factor in this choice would seem to be the differences in expectations from life. If, for example, there is an expectation of being a single mother with a reliance on the help of your own mother to assist with child care then this needs to be done while the mother’s mother is still young enough and capable of helping. This decision is taken on a subconscious level. And though there’s an emphasis on improving sex education for children in the UK, it is actually an improvement in expectation from life that needs emphasis by policy makers; and the instilling of the concept that there are things in later life that are worth waiting for and putting other things off for. To achieve this requires improvements in things like access to collage and university, with the potential to get a better job with greater life prospects.
Another point from the programme was that the amount of time that parents can dedicate to their children significantly improved the prospects of those children. So this includes the time parents have to play games with their children, take then to sporting activities, and so on.
A final point I’d like to pick up on from the programme is about community and the work of Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology in the School of Anthropology, and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His work has shown that each of us have a series of circles of people in our relationships. The first inner circle sees about five close friends and relations, and this is the intimate, emotional support level. The second layer is at about 12-15, where less intimate support and friendship takes place. It isn’t by chance that a large proportion of team sports have player numbers around this range. This number appears a lot in culture and society, 12 member of a jury for example. The next level up is a closed community. The human neocortex part of the brain has evolved to enable us to work well with groups of up to about 150. This is the number at which we can understand how we relate to the people in the group and how they relate to each other.
The MP David Willetts, as the Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills, finds this interesting and it has prompted him to consider differences in behaviour between schools with smaller numbers of pupils and larger schools. There is a tendency for there to be poorer behaviour by pupils where numbers are higher. One argument being that in smaller schools all the pupils can know each other by name and therefore relate much better to each other. The programme gave an example of one school where the headmaster had restructured the school along the 150 people lines.
This raises questions from me about online communities. What number of member within an online community is it possible to still have meaningful relationships with those member? Does this figure of 150 still hold?
eyePlorer is an interesting alternative to the usual approach taken by many when looking for information. Instead of using a search engine to produce a series of unrelated links; eyePlorer is a ‘knowledge engine’ designed to use semantic associations and provide a richer experience of interconnected knowledge. This would seem to have useful applications for education throughout the subject disciplines. And as a student it is useful when studying a topic, or writing an essay, to check that you have covered relevant and related areas to demonstrate a fuller understanding; eyePlorer would therefore seem to be a useful way to explore a topic.
The returned content from a topic search is displayed in an elegant graphical interface. There are plenty of features to get your head around with the eyePlorer interface, most or which are quite intuitive, and I’m pretty sure I won’t cover them all, but it’s worth taking a look at this video:
The circular graphic display is segmented into separate topic areas, with information falling into each of the categories. Alongside each information term or phrase is a dot, and the size of these dots indicates whether the information is well known (larger dots) or more obscure information (smaller dots). You can hover over each term/phrase and after a couple of seconds a knowledge box opens providing you with sourced information. Click on the information in the knowledge box and the page with the source of the information opens up within eyePlorer. Note: to get back to your eyePlorer graph, click the Back button at the top centre of the eyePlorer screen.
Across the top of the knowledge box are four tabs. The tab you’re currently in is the eyePlorer facts. The other three are Websearch (powered by Bing), Images (also powered by Bing), and Twitter.
If you want to investigate any of the items (terms/phrases) in your existing eyePlorer graph, you simply drag the item into a blank search term box or onto the plus (+) below the search term. This creates a new graph associating the two terms, to eliminate the original term from this joint search, click the close down x next to the term. You can move between your graphs using the back < and forward > links just at the bottom left and right (respectively) of your graph.
Here is a video giving more detail. Note: some of the interface shown on the video is different to what you might see, I think there must have been software updates to the interface since the video was produced.
On the right of the + is a globe-like icon; dragging a term/phrase onto this performs a Google search for the term. Note: you have to be quite quick doing the dragging or the knowledge box opens before you get there, if this happens just click the globe icon at the bottom of the knowledge box.
When you register for a free account you get to fully use the second element of eyePlorer, the notepad. Whilst you can use the notepad without having an account, you can’t save any of this information, so it is worth registering. To add things to the notepad you simply drag them across from the graphical display.
Why should the use of eyePlorer knowledge engine be significant to you as an end user?
Well, quoting from the Vionto (the designers of the underlying software) site:
What’s in for our users:
Associate and aggregate information from different web sites or other content sources
Work with a user-friendly, interactive graphical interface
Generate content overviews
Find, process and store knowledge within a single user interface
Gain interesting and unexpected stimuli
Retrieve facts and text results (rather than just lists of links)
There are some quirks to using eyePlorer, and the available information resources might be a little limited for some users currently, but additional sites and resources will I believe continue to be added. I also believe the interface will continue to be improved. I think the concept is a good one and very useful, tapping into a more visual approach for knowledge retrieval, and the interlinking of knowledge – more a search for something and other related and associated content.
Another plus with eyePlorer is that you can add a spot of html into your website to include a dynamic link to eyePlorer.com for a particular search term.
Example term : Web search engine
I think eyePlorer is very much worth trying. And if it doesn’t quite meet your requirements now, possibly try it again in a few months.
I recently posted about Nurphy, a way of having a public ‘conversation’ that is saved, kind of like a recorded email discussion that others can access and even join in with. Now I’ve found something that parallels Nurphy, except it’s about a voice conversation; a sort of way of saving an asynchronous phone conversation that multiple people can participate in.
You can make your discussions private, open or restricted and you can create talkgroups specifically so that others can join to discuss within a particular topic of interest, similar to a discussion in a forum topic.
The talkgroups are categorized so that you can find one you might want to join in with, or you can use the search facility. Also you can list the most recently active, the newest, or the ones with most members.
You can follow the discussions using the RSS feed or you can squirt the feed out into iTunes and follow it as a podcast using the useful iTunes link.
Asynchronous discussions can have some benefits, for example they provide you with time to think before you add in your opinion.
I can imagine using Voxopop instead of trying to record a Skype conversation, or for easier interviewing of multiple participants in geographically separated locations and/or in different time zones. Also, this will allow questions to be put to large communities for responses and discussions. I can see me making some use of this service professionally.#
I haven’t tested this yet, but it has just occurred to me that you should be able to participate using a mobile device, an iPod Touch with a mic fitted for example.
