paul walk’s weblog

I was invited to my first JISC Innovation Forum which took place over Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, and was held in Keele University. Apart from a smattering of light duties - a couple of meetings, helping to ‘referee’ a session (more later) and taking turns to staff the joint UKOLN / CETIS / OSS Watch / TechWatch stand, I was free to get stuck into the real business of this event which was, for me at least, learning & networking.

The forum has a significant online presence, both in terms of the supporting infrastructure (blogs, transcripts etc.) as well as delegates’ own blog posts etc. - look for stuff tagged with ‘jif08‘.

Some of the highlights of the forum included:

The keynote speech from John Selby, Director (Education and Participation), HEFCE: John gave a really clear outline of some of the issues facing JISC in a changing economic climate. Speaking a little about ’socio-technical’ systems, he offered the view that JISC needs to focus on the nature of such systems, portraying them in terms of the following progression:

Innovation -> Implementation -> Sector change

John suggested that JISC tended to concentrate on communities rather than the sector, that communities could be exclusive and that managing technical and social change together is challenging. We should not take for granted that the buzz within the innovative JISC community is recognised or shared outside this community. He also reminded us that JISC is funded by ‘a tax on the sector’ - I have not heard this description used before.

John offered a stark warning when he described the last decade as a ‘golden era’ in terms of funding and security, and predicted that the next few years would not be so golden.

Finally, John admitted that HEFCE’s strategy is not clear enough, and that HEFCE needs to prioritise and clarify its role in terms of how it deals with the sector and with the Government.

More: transcript and link to presentation slides.

The ‘Identity - Starter for Ten’ session: I was asked to help facilitate this session and I’m very glad to have been involved. It was decided to use a technique known as the ‘gold-fish bowl’ to create a free-flowing ‘debate’, where only two people (out of a room of ~35) could speak at any one time, but the either (or both) of the speakers could be replaced at any moment by any of the other participants. We had a small set of rules to govern proceedings and my role was to ‘referee’ the session - which turned out to be very easy. So easy in fact, that I couldn’t help but join in briefly! The starting discussion was around notions of Identity and the management of this in an institutional context. I imagine that those well-versed in these issues probably didn’t learn anything particularly new, but what transpired was a series of arguments, made by some people with real expertise, which gave a pretty good introduction to this area to those who ‘lurked’ and learned. The feed-back I have received so far has been excellent - here is a short video of a self-described ‘lurker’ (sorry - I don’t know who you are!) explaining how he enjoyed the session (interviewed by Lawrie Phipps of JISC who also proposed the Goldfish Bowl approach in the first place).

More: the gold-fish bowl rules and a transcript.

The closing keynote from Jason DaPonte, Managing Editor, BBC Mobile Platforms: Jason gave an instructive speech about some of the issues the BBC is facing in its quest to ‘deepen the relationship between itself and its users’. He characterised the ‘mobile’ context as having the following characteristics:

• personal
• immediate
• location-aware

An application of this approach might be realised in plans to consider moving from the BBC’s ‘where I live’ paradigm to one of ‘where I am’. In my view, and this is informed by my recent acquisition of a location aware iPhone, this aspect of mobile service delivery is becoming rapidly very interesting.

In another part of his presentation, Jason made reference to a DEMOS report, Making the most of collaboration, which sounds very interesting - I have not yet had time to read it. This report examines the state-of-the-art of ‘public service co-design’ - Jason hinted that the higher education sector did not come out of this too well….

More: transcript and link to presentation slides.

Other good moments included being a part of the winning team at the competition (identifying European countries by map outline, and identifying movie posters) over dinner. My 3G iPhone may have been a contributing factor….

And I did enjoy showing an interactive 3D molecule viewer on the iPhone to Jim Downing and Simon Coles, eminent chemists both, and getting the reaction - ’so what’s the underlying data model?’. To which I could only respond, ‘I have no idea - but look how funky it is….’.

While a few aspects weren’t so good (a bizarre and nearly unusable WIFI service and uncomfortable accommodation) I think the forum was a great success overall - I learned plenty and was able to contribute.

Tags: jif08, JISC

I was pleased to be invited by Brian Fuchs to a ‘Million Books Workshop’ at Imperial College, London last Friday. A fascinating day, in the company of what was, for me, an unusual group of 20-30 linguists, classical scholars and computer scientists. The morning session consisted of three presentations (following an introduction from Gregory Crane which I missed thanks to the increasingly awful transport system between London and the South West) which brought us up to speed with some advances in OCR, computer aided text analysis and translation, and classification. The presentations were intended to form an ordered progression:

1. From Image to Text: OCR and Mass Digitisation (Dr. Thomas Breuel, DFKI and Technical University Kaiserslautern)
2. From Text to Information: Machine Translation and Syntax Recognition (David Smith, Johns Hopkins University, & David Bamman, Perseus Project)
3. From Information to Learning: Machine Learning and Classification Techniques (David Mimno, U Mass, Amherst)

Listening to these presentations, I quickly found myself well outside of my comfort zone, in terms of both the science and the domain (classical literature), so it was a challenging and exhilarating morning! It was difficult to take comprehensive notes as I had to really concentrate on the presentations at times in order to follow them - the pace was pretty smart, with jargon and ‘in jokes’ galore.

David Smith, Johns Hopkins University gave a fascinating and entertaining presentation which outlined some of the challenges, and advances, in language parsing and translation. He pointed out that although the structured view of the semantic web is a seductive one, even the newer online, digital genres such as email, blogs mostly use unstructured or semi-structured text. However, parsing free text is very difficult, especially with the growing scale and diversity of texts available on the web. To illustrate this he employed a series of (sometimes amusing) translations from the Google translation service. The best available technology today uses supervised machine learning techniques to build a treebank. An alternative approach employs semi-supervised, modelling techniques. Parallel texts in different languages are useful but, for some languages, only the Universal Declaration of Human Rights exists as a parallel text! As an aside, David pointed to the potential advantage in search engines searching several languages: if you enter your query in English for example, by searching resources in other languages, the search engine automatically expands the search, utilises synonyms etc. ‘for free’. This can then be more effective than monolingual searching. David offered a future based in pragmatism: translation support rather than fluent translation.

David Mimno presented on classification, sequences & topic modelling. In an interesting talk, it was the visualisation (as a topical transfer graph) of topic relations extrapolated from citations in a set of scholarly communications which really got the audience engaged - a series of questions ensued before David could move on. He illustrated his work with accessible examples: for example, it turned out from one experiment that the single term most likely to identify email spam was, believe it or not, the word “red” showing in the markup, owing to the fact that “only spammers use red text”! Apparently, he had a system which could classify any of Shakespeare’s plays as tragedy, comedy or history…. with the exception of Romeo and Juliet, which comes out as a comedy for some reason….

The takeaway for me was that some of the technology in these spaces is maturing. Thomas Breuel, for instance, made a compelling case for really effective OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in his description of the open-source OCRopus project, which he leads and which is sponsored by Google. Building on previous systems like the character recognition system Tesseract, OCRopus employs a modular design with components which offer the following workflow, focussing on the processing of scanned books:

layout analysis -> isolated character recognition -> statistical language modelling - > text

The project is heading towards a beta release this year, and the team plan to create a deployment ‘bundle’ in the form of an Amazon EC2 AMI. I didn’t quite catch the details but I think they have found a way to monetise this through the Amazon referral program, which sounds interesting. In any case, the idea is that one could take the AMI, deploy it, run it for a few hours to process a particular scan, and then shut it down again - potentially a very cost-effective way of proceeding. Thomas made the point that, as OCR technology continues to improve, we are likely to want to process scans of books several times. He explained how the project was aiming towards a “full digital library pipeline”, a system which could be deployed from a connected laptop: with the new affordability of powerful digital cameras, a researcher might photograph a book’s pages themselves before feeding the resulting image into the OCRopus workflow OCRopus can handle the distortion effect of non-flat pages very effectively). Another interesting aspect of this work is the distributed parallel training which underpins the statistical language modelling: a large model is achieved by combining many little models created by many people, through the web. If you are interested in this area, then you should also check out the hOCR format specification and tools.

I had been invited to this workshop because of my role and interest in the deployment of services at a community and network level. I joined a panel at the the very end of the day where we were invited to consider what services and infrastructure might be required, in the UK, to support the digitisation and useful processing of a ‘million books’. We didn’t get very far with this because we had run out of time and, I suspect, energy by this point, but the question remains…. I’ll be picking this up with some colleagues in due course.

Fascinating day, and topped of with a quick pint standing outside a packed London pub in a light drizzle, which was actually a refreshing and pleasant way to conclude!

Tags: David A Smith, David Mimno, Gregory Crane, hOCR, millon books, OCRopus, Thomas Breuel

Having attended the CRIG Unconference last week, I think that it delivered much that was interesting and valuable. I look forward to the results of the synthesis of the many contributions from the delegates. Although there was just one formal presentation, the volume of content was still considerable, as just about everyone actively contributed something. The final analysis will have to demonstrate whether or not the quality of the content has been good enough to be useful. I’m particularly interested to see if the nature of the synthesis of the content is such that it can be demonstrated that the unconference has delivered something which would be difficult to arrange otherwise.

Spread over one and a half days, the unconference was probably a little too long. I’ve particpated in ‘open-space‘ before, but in a concentrated 3 hour session, not spread over two days. Having said that, it is not reasonable to get people to travel from all over the country to attend a session which only lasts a few hours. Some of the logistics didn’t work so well - it was difficult/impossible to see the SWORD demonstrations in the side room because there just wasn’t enough physical space.

Having said that, some of the logistics worked brilliantly. The pub which was chosen for an informal ‘un-dinner’ was perfect - just the right size, no loud music, walking distance from conference venue and accommodation. Conversation ranged widely, but it was non-stop and a significant proportion of this was around the CRIG domain. David seized the opportunity to gather more feedback in true unconference style (he must carry A3 flip-chart paper and felt-tip pens when he goes to the pub just in case…!) I think the second day worked better than the first - people had warmed up by then, the ‘rules of engagement’ were a little clearer, and the previous evening’s session in the pub had broken the ice.

Some highlights for me included some discussions around SRU/W - (’yes please’ to SRU, ‘no thanks’ to SRW). Remembering to serve developers by making artefacts stored in repositories directly addressable with ‘cool’ URLs was a theme which got general support. And there seems to be wide-spread dissatisfaction with the state of ‘packaging’ in metadata terms. People got to ‘vote’ on ideas using a version of the ‘dotmocracy‘ approach. This worked pretty well - again, I look forward to seeing the outcome of this ‘democracy of ideas’.

I think this may have been the first large gathering I have been to where the Mac users outnumbered the Windows/Linux users. Mind you, the user of the MacBook in the picture might become an ex-Mac user if they adopt this kind of practice:

BTW - I see that I am reported to have said “Wouldn’t it be great if the outcome of this unconference was that repositories were just wrong?” at At the CRIG Unconference last week. (here and here). I did, in fact, utter these words…. but in a sarcastic response to someone who had proffered the observation that “repositories are just wrong” in one of the one-minute roundup sessions. I have an interest in the development of repositories, and I also have an interest in the development and use of unconference techniques. There is a certain scepticism, in parts of the repositories community at least, about the efficacy of unconferences. Such scepticism could only have been reinforced if the CRIG Unconference had delivered shallow thinking, glib conclusions and sound-bites. This was my concern, and the reason for my sarcasm. For the record, I think that there is much that is valuable in repository research, development and deployment.

Tags: CRIG, Dotmocracy, JISC, jisc-crig-unconference-2007, open-space, unconference

David Flanders and I share an interest in the notion of the ‘unconference‘, so I’m pleased to be participating in the CRIG Unconference which David and the ‘WoCRIG’ team has organised. David introduces the idea of the unconference thus:

An un-conference is a combination of the best parts of a conference (face-to-face discussions generating new ideas, passionate debates and genuine information exchange) with all the PowerPoint stripped out. The agenda is set by the attendees on the day in a very simple and direct way - there is no signing up for predetermined break-out sessions and no sitting through interminable PowerPoint presentations. We are using this unconventional method because we want to encourage new thinking and new outcomes for the repository landscape.

I have participated in meetings before which were run along ‘open space‘ lines, but nothing with the time-scale of the CRIG conference. I’m optimistic that this will work well and deliver interesting results. The WoCRIG team intends to use a facilitation method called ‘Dotmocracy‘ which I’m especially looking forward to experiencing.

Related CRIG support activities have included a series of conversations, recorded and made available as podcasts. A really nice touch here is the use of mind-maps to give the ‘at a glance’ summary of what each podcasted conversation has covered. I think this is important because it makes the podcasts browsable - with transcripts they could also become searchable.

David and the WoCRIG team should be commended for a competent and determined attempt to raise the bar on community/project support and engagement.

A night spent in a fairly modern but spartan student university hall - all aluminium staircases and orange walls (Frederique of JISC described it as the ‘EasyJet’ of student acommodation). I kept waking up wondering why I hadn’t been woken up by Harvey….

And so to the main auditorium, for the first plenary session. The auditorium had been dressed up in a way that reminded me of the launch venue for some new corporate venture - complete with a background of cheesy, dated rock music.

Following a welcome from Professor Ken Brodlie, Malcolm Atkinson, UK e-Science Envoy, delivered the opening keynote, offering a view of the future of e-Science. This was a pretty useful ‘big picture’ account of e-Science. I was interested to see Malcolm refer to Jeanette Wing’s Computational Thinking as having had a real impact in thinking about the immediate future for e-Science.

Next up, Dr Satoshi Sekiguchi taking about GEOGrid, which marries geographical data from satellite imagery as well as from statistical and GIS sources to grid computing resources. Large data-sets are crunched to provide applications such as ‘disaster mitigation’. A specific example of this combined a geological map of a part of Afghanistan with rainfall data for the region to create a susceptibility map. This was a fascinating and clearly presented talk. With a slight wobble in English usage, one of the slides had just the following caption:

OK, no problem, GRID would help you

which I thought could have been used as a tagline for the entire conference!

I then did the rounds of the booths, enjoying a demonstration of AstroGrid, a virtual observatory system funded by the UK Government. I also met Sheila Anderson and Stuart Dunn of the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHESSC) who are doing some interesting work supporting their community as part of the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC initiative on e-Science in Arts and Humanities research.

The first keynote following an excellent lunch was on the science of aging and was delivered by Prof. Tom Kirkwood. Tom pointed out the huge potential impact of the aging demographic - the relentless increase in life expectancy. Apparently, in the UK, an individual’s life expectancy increases by five hours every day. This makes my head spin. Tom claims that the impact of humanity’s demographic aging will be larger than climate change. His talk also introduced me to some new terms like ‘healthspan’ and ‘lifecourse’. Interesting and frightening by turns.

I followed this up by attending the session on VREs where we were treated to a set of descriptions of a very diverse range of usages of VREs, as well as a rather slick video. Unfortunately, the video is in WMV format so it may not be easily enjoyed on all platforms. Someone else has already asked why this isn’t on YouTube - JISC are considering it. The content is good, and that’s the main thing.

A decent Chicken Jalfrezi for dinner, a few drinks, and catching up with some familiar faces. The opportunities for networking have been good at this event. I have a growing list of contacts to follow up and projects to check out.

Technorati Tags: aging, ahessc, ahm2007, astrogrid, escience-ahm-2007, geogrid, grid, healthspan, susceptibility-map, vre

I’ve travelled to Nottingham, to the East Midlands Conference Centre, to attend the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2007. With my academic background being rooted predominately in the humanities, I’m looking forward to immersing myself for the next 4 days in a very different set of disciplines. I’m also wondering what chance I have of getting the conference dinner, scheduled for Wednesday evening, moved to a bar showing the England v Russia match….

They work you hard here - we started at 17:00 and went on to 20:00. I attended the OMII-UK session - a series of shortish presentations about OMII-UK work and sponsored projects. A fair amount of this was devoted to the AccessGrid. Much of the current work with this technlogy is focussed on trying to make it easier to install and use, as well as addressing stability and performance issues. It seems that a major barrier to take-up and use of this technology is the relatively complex installation. Nonetheless, the speakers were enthusiastic about the technology, especially with it’s extensible architecture. Later on, I asked a few people if they used the AccessGrid and, if so, why they used it instead of something simple to install and use like Skype. It seemed to me, based on what I had heard, that one might choose to use the AccessGrid because of its richer functionality. In fact, the unanimous response was that the extra functionality was not particularly attractive, and that the AccessGrid was preferred to Skype only because it can currently support a larger group in a conference ‘call’ than Skype. A couple of delegates agreed that if Skype could support, say, 20 users in a group call then they would use this in preference.

Much of the OMII-UK session concerned portals, portlets and delivering AccessGrid and other services through portals. I was on safe ground here, having done my share of portal development. I was interested to see that this technology has not really advanced greatly in the year since I stopped working in this area. It was also curious to note how several demonstrations used Java Web Start - this seems to be alive and kicking in the e-Science world, where it has been largely ignored in enterprise IT.

Ann Borda from JISC kindly invited me a little later and I joined some JISC people and some visiting Australians for dinner in Nottingham, which was a very pleasant affair. When I mentioned OSS Watch to the Australians, they misheard me and thought I had said something like ‘OzWatch’. We agreed that JISC should probably fund a new service for keeping an eye on the activities of the Australians
I could see no sign in the conference literature about an ‘official’ tag to use for blogging about or bookmarking the conference, so I have decided to invent one here - who knows, it might be picked up by other bloggers. The tag I’ve come up with is:

escience-ahm-2007

Update: I just realised that Peter Murray-Rust did the same and coined a different tag, ‘ahm2007′. I will use his tag as well as mine.

Technorati Tags: AccessGrid, escience-ahm-2007, omii-uk, oss-watch, oz-watch, ahm2007, web-start

I spent Wednesday at a small event called Open source community - friend or foe?, organised by OSS Watch to discuss strategies for developing communities around development projects.

To quote from their website, OSS Watch:

OSS Watch promotes awareness and understanding of the legal, social, technical and economic issues that arise when educational institutions engage with free and open source software. It does this by providing unbiased advice and guidance to UK higher and further education.

OSSWatch are now ‘drinking their own koolaid’ (so much nicer than ‘eating their own dog-food’) - they’ve created an OSS development project (Simal) and begun to assemble a development community around it.

A good portion of the day was spent outlining the tools necessary for maintaining a community-based development project. We heard that ‘every tool should do three things’, and that, at a minimum, the core set of tools you really need are a website, issue-tracking, version-control and a discussion list.

OSSWatch were careful to avoid recommending particular tools for development. But which tools are they using to help them manage their own development project? Turns out, they’re using Google Code! This is an important thing to know about OSSWatch - despite the plethora of readily available open-source tools available for managing development communities/projects, they have picked the one they think is best, which happens to be decidedly closed-source. There are two important messages here I think:

• OSSWatch are not open-source bigots - they offer a balanced and considered view
• You should use the best available tools for managing your community-based development project

OSSWatch are actively engaged with helping projects in our community develop their communities. Some such projects were represented at the event on Wednesday and their feedback was very positive.

I learned plenty from this session and look forward to working more closely with OSSWatch. I took away a few specific ideas which is always a good result.

Anyone in the UK HE and FE communities considering embarking on a open-source software development project should consider developing a community as a priority, and if they need help and advice about this then OSS Watch should be their first port of call.

However, the big question for me is:

While the community approach to development is (sometimes) demonstrably successful (Apache, Eclipse etc.), can it work if it’s scaled down to a typical 18month JISC-funded development project?

OSSWatch tell us that they are currently wrestling with this very issue. Watch this space…

(After the event we raised a glass to Randy Metcalfe, who is returning to Canada after years in Britain - bon voyage Randy!)

Technorati Tags: community, GoogleCode, OSS, OSSWatch, software development

(Note - For the purposes of this post, I’ll be using the quasi-conventional shorthand of RL to mean ‘real life’, as opposed to SL meaning ‘Second Life’.)

Just got back from the Eduserv Symposium 2007 in London. An interesting event which, however you cut it, became essentially a review of the relevance or otherwise of Second Life to education, despite the title of the conference suggesting virtual worlds in general. Andy Powell (host, and Director of Development, Eduserv Foundation), quite reasonably cited the ‘Hoover’ example, where a generic product becomes labeled by its most successful or well-known brand. While Andy acted as master of ceremonies in RL, Pete Johnstone performed the same role in SL. Because of inherent limitations in SL regarding numbers of concurrent occupants in any given virtual region, the SL candidates were distributed across three regions. Pete was taking care of all three: it looked like he was working hard all day!

This is the first conference I have been to where the ‘virtual attendance’ of delegates was more than an incidental aspect. In this case it was a core feature of the conference, with the real-life (RL) delegates being able to see the avatars of the delegates attending virtually in SL on several large screens in the auditorium. I had anticipated something like this, but not the prominence of these screens. The effect, for me at least, was of extending the auditorium into SL through large ‘windows’. I thought it worked really well - it would have required not a little courage on the part of the organisers to try this.

As I was there in RL, I obviously didn’t experience the conference from the other side of the ‘mirror’, but I was able to read some of the comments from the SL delegates and they seemed very positive. The RL event was being streamed to SL, with a 6 second lag.

We saw a number of presentations from people in education & business. Some highlights:

From Dr. Jim Purbrick of Linden Labs (creators of SL) we heard how SL is a ‘creation engine’. He described the range of creative activities going on in SL, such as building sophisticated working machines, artificial life research, movie making. Supplying us with some demographics, Jim pointed out that the majority of SL users are now European rather than North American. According to him, some of SL’s best aspects include the ‘instant gratification’ of being able to start creating immediately, coupled with the fact that the creation environment is not separate, resulting in what he termed ‘always on creation’.

Roo Reynolds of IBM described IBM’s (considerable) activities in SL, the ways in which they are exploring the use of SL as a business tool (meetings etc.) and how they are starting to look at building something similar with an off-the-shelf game-engine (Torque?) for their corporate intranet. Roo made much of the impact of meetings in SL, explaining how social interactions occur ‘naturally’ and even accidentally or serendipitously - something which does not happen with more conventional virtual meeting tools. At the risk of over-simplifying, I guess he’s referring to the ‘body-language’ possible with 3D avatars - still quite primitive, but apparently the information conveyed by just the direction of an avatar’s gaze can be quite rich. In a similar vein, it is possible to ’see’ the social networking going on in a virtual meeting by simply observing the clusters of people - just like in RL. I found this interesting.

Following a succession of enthusiastic, but somehow not entirely satisfying examples of potential in SL for education, the never dull Stephen Downes stepped up to the microphone. It became steadily apparent that Stephen is unconvinced by SL. By his own description, he occasionally enters SL and hangs around in a virtual bar, and wonders what the fuss is about. He has 13 Linden dollars to his name. His chosen image is of a penniless hobo. Stephen proceeded to deconstruct the claims being made about SL. He claims that one attraction of SL is that it is nothing new - it’s actually comforting because of it’s conservatism. Inviting us to imagine what would have resulted if we had ‘commissioned’ a company like Linden Labs to develop and run the Web, Stephen pointed to the tension between the successful economic model underpinning SL, and the facade of openness, common creation etc. I couldn’t help noticing that Jim of Linden Labs was wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Will work for L$”….

I applaud Eduserv for an ambitious symposium, well executed! I’ll be visiting Second Life again as a result. Now where did my avatar wander off to….?

Technorati Tags: Babbage Linden, e-learning, Eduserv, efsym2007, Jim Purbrick, learning, Linden, Roo Reynolds, Second Life, Stephen Downes, Virtual worlds

On Thursday I attended and spoke at the The Shock of the Old 2007: Shock of the Social conference at the Said Business School, Oxford University. I was speaking as a replacement for Brian Kelly who came up with the original idea for the talk, Does Web 2.0 Herald The End Of In-House Development And Provision Of IT Services? I blogged about this a couple of weeks ago inviting comments which I was able to incorporate into my presentation. My intention was to try to add value to the presentation, and to make it more social by:

• blogging about it beforehand, inviting comments
• incorporating any comments into the presentation
• providing a real-time chat facility with the presentation
• distributing the slides widely (on the UKOLN site and on slideshare)
• blogging about the conference after the event (this post), using the designated tag (shock2007), and inviting more comments

The feedback I got was pretty positive, although the real-time chat idea didn’t really work very well in practice - too distracting according to one participant. The ‘blogging about it afterwards’ idea hasn’t worked out too well in practice either - people started leaving comments on the original posting before I had chance to write a new one!

The conference in general was great - a good, varied collection of presentations on using social/Web 2.0 software for doing everything from teaching Divinity to creating an environment designed to encourage ’self-disclosure’ as part of a psychology course (fascinating, if a little disturbing….) which was illustrative of the potentially ‘confessional’ aspect of blogging, for instance.

Randy Metcalfe in his presentation explained that he participates in all kinds of social software using his ‘real identity’. I have, in the past, used several pseudonyms for blogging etc. but have recently decided to use my public identity for all such activities. My rationale is that it will soon (if it isn’t already) be possible to unearth just about anything I have contributed in public spaces, so I might as well get into the habit of assuming that this will happen.

In the pub afterwards I joined in an absorbing argument about blogging, anonymously or openly. I now blog entirely openly, where another participant (name intentionally reserved) in the argument explained that they blogged anonymously, taking some effort to maintain this anonymity. We talked about the recent AOL debacle and how this demonstrated the difficulty of maintaining an anonymous virtual existence.

It was good to catch up with some of the e-Learning crowd - I enjoyed and learned from pretty much all of the presentations, caught up with some familiar faces, and met some new people.

The Said Business School is a first-class venue for this kind of conference. The lecture-room facilities were impressive, the catering was pretty good, the WIFI worked as advertised and was free (to the end-user at least).

Technorati Tags: AOL, blogging, randy metcalfe, shock2007, UKOLN, Web 2.0