Playing with Socioviz (socioviz.net) - a free online tool for looking at influence on twitter. The image to left show connections between tweeters using the hashtag #StarWars on the 30th December 2015 up to 6pm (GMT). Figure 2 shows the most active tweeters for this hashtag and the most influential based on Retweets and Mentions - the four greatest influencers are picked out in the video below, showing the map evolving (speed-up 20 times).
figure 2
To experiment with this a bit more +The Royal Institution has a long traditional of holding a series of Christmas Lectures which are now televised, Dr Kevin Fong presented this years. I was curious about who the biggest influencers on twitter were for the hashtag #xmaslectures over the three days of the show. The three biggest influencers came out as @Kevin_Fong@Ri_Science@astro_timpeake, the presenter, the host organisation and one of the main guests (had to present virtually as he is on the ISS at the time of writing. The figure below shows the centre of the graph were the majority of the connections.
Another example of used it for is plotting a particular tweetchat and seeing if there were groupings within the data there was for this particular chat.
As part of the two modules involving research methods I have been 'playing' with mindmaps in the class to capture the discussion. Figure 1 above was taken from a classroom discussion around some of the issues within a project idea that the group was working on. The tool used is the free on-line tool https://bubbl.us/ .
Figure 2
Figure 2 shows the tool. Is it the best mindmapping tool out there? I think it is fair to say it isn't, I have some paid ones installed that offer a greater range of features. It was selected as it is-
Online;
Free;
Simple to use;
At the end of the session I wanted to the students to have the final map we had produced together so only having an image of the map was fine. All views are the authors, and may not reflect the views of any organisation the author is connected with in any way.
Apart from it's name (Screencast-o-matic) I really like this piece of video screen capture software. Even though (or especially as) it is a free bit of software it has some very nice features: - you choose capture the screen either through a downloaded app or through a link on the site (i.e. no download needed) - When the cursor is moving you get a large yellow circle surrounding it and it clear where it is. Which is great for demonstrating software in a video. - When you left click the mouse you get a brief blue blob on the screen next to the cursor to show a click has occurred. Again, great when demonstrating software. - you get up to 15 minutes per recording. - several videos formats are possible. - it is easy to use. - last and certainly not least it is free. On the free version you get Screencast-O-Matic.com across the bottom of the screen, but in my view that is easy to live with and doesn't really distract from the content.
As a complementary tool to use alongside software such as Panopto this is a very nice tool. The software can be found at: http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/ I would be interested in receiving comments from others on other similar pieces of software.
What is your vision of a gamer? Possibly a male aged between 14 and 25?
Recent figures by the US Entertainment Software Association states that in the US, 44 per cent of gamers are female with the average age of female gamer being 43 years old.
In the UK, a 2014 study by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) shows the majority of gamers are female (52 per cent). So the stereotype of gamers does not fit the reality. Mobile games are an important market, but in the IAB report of the female gamers polled within the previous six months 47 per cent played a disc-based game, 68 per cent had played an online game and 56 per cent have played on a console.
So what about the games industry? In recent years, there has been a lot of criticism of a large workplace gender imbalance, unfair treatment of women in terms of pay and conditions; combined with a mentality that produce female game characters that are 'hyper-sexualised'.
The recent Gamsutra 2014 Salary Survey for US-based staff showed that female games designers earned on average 6 per cent less than their male counterparts and female visual artists earned 26 per cent less. Some of the difference has been put down to the effects of careers breaks on long-term earning potential; leading to suggestions that culture of working long hours needs to change.
Claudia Goldin in the same report said "The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who laboured long hours and worked particular hours."
The industry is trying to address this. TIGA, a UK trade association for the games industry has been trying to make changes by working with partners including the organisation, Women in Games, to produce a set of Equal Opportunities Policies to help address some of these issues. Women in Games is one of the leading groups actively trying to address these issues, actively seeking to address the gender imbalance but also through providing discussion opportunities for industry and academia to come together.
One of the other ways that could increase women into this industry is the welcome changes in the UK National Curriculum. By making computing a separate area from the related area of ICT, could make computing and games programming seem less threatening and 'less male'. There is also the question of whether parents' views need to change to increase women into this industry.
Sources:
Department of Education (2013) National curriculum in England: computing programmes of study - Publications - GOV.UK. [online]. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-computing-programmes-of-study [Accessed August 22, 2015].
Entertainment Software Association; (2015) Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Games Industry.
Gamasutra (2014) Gamasutra Salary Survey 2014. Gamasutra. [online]. Available from: http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2014/09/05/GAMA14_ACG_SalarySurvey_F.pdf [Accessed August 22, 2015].
Jayanth, M. (2014) 52% of gamers are women – but the industry doesn't know it | Meg Jayanth | Comment is free | The Guardian. Guardian.
TIGA (2015) TIGA | Tiga Publishes Free Equal Opportunities Policy Templates For Uk Games Businesses | Press Releases. [online]. Available from: http://www.tiga.org/news/press-releases/tiga-publishes-free-equal-opportunities-policy-templates-for-uk-games-businesses [Accessed August 22, 2015].
Problem solving is not trivial (Beaumont and Fox, 2003). In fact, if we think about Bloom’s Taxonomy’s (Bloom 1956) and the Cognitive Domain, problem-solving involves the high-level skills of synthesis, evaluation, analysis and applications, so perhaps it is not surprising that student’s often struggle in this area and with subjects based around problem-solving (such as programming). A much discussed and related area of Computational Thinking(Wing, 2006) has raised the profile of areas such as problem-solving, by highlighting the importance of “thinking like a computer scientist” (Wing 2006). The thought processes involved in being a computer scientist are more complicated than just being able to program, “Computational thinking is reformulating a seemingly difficult problem into one we know how to solve, perhaps by reduction, embedding, transformation, or simulation.” (Wing, 2006). The skills of computer scientists are applicable to a much wider range of areas or as Wing states: “One can major in computer science and go on to a career in medicine, law, business, politics, any type of science or engineering, and even the arts.” (Wing, 2006).
Characteristics of Computational Thinking (Wing 2006):
“Conceptualizing, not programming. Computer science is not computer programming. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires thinking at multiple levels of abstraction;
Fundamental, not rote skill. A fundamental skill is something every human being must know to function in modern society. Rote means a mechanical routine. Ironically, not until computer science solves the AI Grand Challenge of making computers think like humans will thinking be rote;
A way that humans, not computers, think. Computational thinking is a way humans solve problems; it is not trying to get humans to think like computers. Computers are dull and boring; humans are clever and imaginative. We humans make computers exciting. Equipped with computing devices, we use our cleverness to tackle problems we would not dare take on before the age of computing and build systems with functionality limited only by our imaginations;
Complements and combines mathematical and engineering thinking. Computer science inherently draws on mathematical thinking, given that, like all sciences, its formal foundations rest on mathematics. Computer science inherently draws on engineering thinking, given that we build systems that interact with the real world. The constraints of the underlying computing device force co puter scientists to think computationally, not just mathematically. Being free to build virtual worlds enables us to engineer systems beyond the physical world;
Ideas, not artifacts. It’s not just the software and hardware artifacts we produce that will be physically present everywhere and touch our lives all the time, it will be the computational concepts we use to approach and solve problems, manage our daily lives, and communicate and interact with other people; and
For everyone, everywhere. Computational thinking will be a reality when it is so integral to human endeavors it disappears as an explicit philosophy.”(Wing 2006)
Beaumont, C., & Fox, C. (2003). Learning Programming: Enhancing Quality Through Problem-Based Learning (pp. 90-95) 4th Annual Conference of the ICS HE Academy Galway: ICS.
Bloom, B., S. (ed.) (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, the classification of educational goals – Handbook I: Cognitive Domain New York: McKay.
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/exploring-computational-thinking.html To read more on this area go to: http://compuationalthinking.blogspot.co.uk/ 2. Junkbots and Computational Thinking A recent presentation as part of the Department of Computing and Immersive Technologies, University of Northampton Research Seminar series, looking a on going project within the Department. Junkbots has been a ongoing and ever evolving project since 2009 around the use of 'junk' as part of activities to developing skills in STEM subjects. In particular in the presentation (below) shows the links between these activities and Computational Thinking were discussed.
There has recently been quite a lot of excitement about the Raspberry Pi, and rightly so. At around £25 for a computer (you need to have a keyboard and TV) it has lots of features that make it interesting.
For me though its most interesting feature is it is a no-frills device that doesn’t look like the black box in the corner – it’s a circuit board with some chips and connections. Why is that interesting? Well, that’s what a computer essentially is. It is cheap enough that if it breaks it is not a serious problem, and in most cases people are unlikely to write something that will break the machine anyway.
There has, quite rightly, been a lot of excitement – because of the price, and for encouraging school children to learn to program. I agree with this whole-heartedly, but there is potentially a more interesting feature, what else can you do with it? Yes, you can word process, run video or connect to the internet, but what if you connected it to something else? What if you combined them together or connect cameras to them – what could you produce at a relatively low cost?
A low cost device that can be used to encourage ideas to be played with, where it doesn’t matter too much if it goes wrong – that is where the excitement should be. I do not know what is going to come out of it, but I am very interested to find out.
Dr Scott Turner, Associate Professor in Computing and Immersive Technologies, gives his view on machines replacing people at work...
"Some futurists such as Ray Kurzweil at Google (Devlin, 2015) have been predicting robots will reach human levels of intelligence by 2029, raising concerns about job losses. This time the concerns have shifted a little from where traditionally machines have replaced people in jobs - the dangerous and the dull roles - to more white-collared roles such as analytical jobs, journalism and online marketing. In 2011 (Gabbatt, 2011) Watson, an artificial intelligence system developed by IBM, won on the games shown Jeopardy! then went on to be used for medical diagnostic use.
Before we start imagining the apocalyptic visions of The Matrix and Terminator; this is not new. Artificial Intelligences (AI) techniques are widely used now. Credit card companies use AI based technologies to detect potential fraudulent spending patterns, there is a long history of AI being used to dig into medical data to gain new insights and Amazon's recommendations are based around AI techniques.
Potential jobs losses due to new technologies are not new news. One example is the typist pool, another web-developers. In terms of job losses, due to AI, there is not a consensus (Elkins, 2014) for example believes there will be a 30 per cent loss in jobs, other experts suggest a zero net-loss, and others even an increase in new roles (for humans). Robots in the care industry is a potential growth area: robots do not replace carers, instead acting as assistants. These 'social robots' act as companions, for example two robots for the home Buddy (Indiegoo, 2015) and JIBO (JIBO, 2015).
Countries such as Germany and USA are taking steps to increase their industrial competitiveness, via Industry 4.0 (Deloitte, 2014), which is based around taking measures that integrating AI and communications into their production and logistics chain. These technologies are disruptive but there is no evidence, yet, that they will bring about our destruction but we do need to manage their introduction."
Dr Scott Turner, Senior Lecturer, Computing, School of Science and Technology
Recently there has been a lot of interest in the news on more programming and computing in schools (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16493929). I believe this is very likely to be seen positively by a lot of the computing profession. The British Computer Society (BCS) have been campaigning about computing being seen as a separate subject to information and communications technology (ICT), or computing – at the very least – as an option within ICT in the National Curriculum.
So what is the problem? Computing is more than ICT; there is a belief that people are being put off computing by the difference not being clearer. Common myths include:
Everything has been done. This is not true, it’s an area where new things come along all the time. This is one of the exciting challenges of being a computing professional.
It is all about using databases and spreadsheets . Using databases is important but so is the theory of them. Spreadsheets, in a computer science course, only play a very minor role and may not even be taught.
It is all about business analysis. That is just one aspect, other aspects included but certainly not limited to are:
Programming
Games and other graphics. Who writes the software in the first place?
Hardware. Someone has to write the programs that go into aircraft or cars.
Mobile applications A growing area at the moment.
Web based applications. Webpages can be produced without a lot of computing knowledge, but making the pages do some of the more ‘clever’ things does.
Security. All those online transactions we all do, understanding where the loopholes are, programming tricks that hackers will or could try, takes some computing knowledge.
What role can universities play? Even before the recent news articles, universities have been actively going into and working with schools, trying to bring in a different perspective of computing. Examples from this University include.
Junkbots: Using a real programming language to program Lego robots. This has been successfully carried out in primary and secondary schools reaching over 150 students.
Be Switched On: An on-campus activity giving Year 12 and 13 examples of computing at university. Activities include programming robots or building 3D computer models.
Women into computing: presenting an alternative face to computing by school students meeting female computing professionals and computing students.
It is in the best interest of universities to do this. Undergraduates who know something about programming and computing before they start would make the courses even more intellectually stimulating.
As an aside, personally I find ideas tried in outreach activities sometimes inform or lead to activities I do with undergraduates, as well as the other way around.
All views are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect any organisations I am associated with.
