New Media Katho course – June09 evaluations

During the first week of June I was in Belgium again delivering for the second time my own course on new media. I had 14 Erasmus students from all over Europe, a dynamic, lively and very interested class that I have enjoyed teaching. It was a marathon class with 4 hours of teaching daily, tight deadlines, team projects, a company visit, small research tasks, and other academic assignments. It was also a class of novelties, the first time when I had a guest, Dr Mugur Geana, Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication at the University of Kansas, joining us live all the way from the USA. 

Similar with the last semester, all students were asked to take a short online survey evaluating the course, the content, my delivery, the materials and technologies used, the relevancy of the course to their future careers and giving their suggestions for further improvements. 

What makes me especially happy is that the evaluations this semester are better than the previous ones. I am also glad to see that students liked the hands-on approach to the class and found it useful and challenging.

Here’s the overall evaluation for the course:

You can see the complete evaluation file here:

Play the Game 2009 Conference

Last week I was in Coventry, UK, to present a paper at Play the Game 2009, one of the biggest communication conferences on sport and society, now at its 6th edition. It was a busy conference with many speakers coming from a very wide range of fields and institutions, starting from sports journalism up to the IOC, human rights advocacy groups and up to academia. 

I was part of the Beijing 2008: Business and Politics session sharing the floor with Joern Hansen, Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, Anders Hasselgaard, Researcher at NUPI, and Rowan Simons, author of the recently published Bamboo Goalposts and Chairman of several sports organizations. The session covered rather different views on Beijing, from the influence of financial interests on awarding the Games to Beijing, the flaws of China’s system of sports governance to human rights discourse and the presence, campaigns and influence of human rights advocacy groups in Beijing last year. However, the difference in point of views led to a interesting and lively debate afterwards. 

Check out my presentation below:

Vizualization tools – update

Some weeks ago I wrote a post about vizualization tools focusing on what could be useful for quantitative and qualitative researchers alike. I have mentioned then that my favorite was IMB’s ManyEyes platform. An update to that post is needed but this time I’ll be focusing on chart and diagram making applications. Below is a chart of all the sites I have found. It is an easy way to compare their offer. I will make some additional comments about the quality of the images they produce.

Creately and Gliffy have the most varied offer followed closely by LovelyCharts. Design-wise, my favorite is LovelyCharts but for paying 29 Euros/year for the premium version I would like to have the opportunity to exclude their logo. Apple does it on all their products, so why shouldn’t they? Also, for a premium version I would like to see the audio recording option that Flowcharts and iCharts are both offering. 

Essentially, all these online platforms offer an interpretation for software and programs that already exist be they licensed by Microsoft, Apple or be they OpenSource. It is nice though to have some design alternatives. It is even nicer to be offered the opportunity to collaborate on documents and share them later either by embedding them on third-party websites on by emailing them to people. This is where the advantage of these platforms is. 

Happy diagraming!

Just to make sure, here are the links to all platforms I mentioned:

Creately.com, Chartle.net, lovelycharts.com, chartgizmo.com, archimy.com, gliffy.com, icharts.com, flowchart.com, drawanywhere.com, orgplus.com

Interactive timelines

Timelines are important and necessary visual elements that make any presentation that encompasses any historical information – be it personal, institutional, national or be it related to recently or long passed times -. Luckily there are a couple of platforms out there, free of charge, that researchers can use to make their work more appealing as well as to give it an extra visual dimension. 

I would say that there are two categories of timeline visualization tools: 

• those that aggregate information already present online that they aggregate using an integrated search engine  such as Dipity, Viewzi or Spacetime 3D
• those that allow users to create their own timelines such as TimeToast, XTimeline, LifeSnapz or LifeBlob.

I’ll try to take them one by one and highlight some of their features. I’ll start with one of my favorites, a new way to experience search as they like to call it, Viewzi,

Starting from simple search topics, the platform offers plenty visualization options, all a click away. One can choose between web screen shot, simple text, power grid, google timeline, viewzi news or 4 news sources, photo tag cloud, photos, videos from Joost, YouTube and Viddler, all these great for media/communication/historical research. There are some more fun options such recipes, weather, celebrity gossip and everyday shopping. 

Thanks to their use of Adobe Flash (c) technology the timelines that Viewzi creates are crisp and refined. I’ve put here an example of photo tags that I have generated based on a long search “beijing 2008 olympic games human rights”. I was allowed to move the main tags around which triggered even more information to be shown as well as links between notions. The graph shows that the notions of olympic games, china and human rights are interdependent and inter-related.  

When you start using it, do take some time to read the “more info” on each visualization option. It will tell you where the data comes from, who loves it and how it was rated.  You’ll also get some recommendations for what the visualizations provided work best. Although it is not clear to me yet, creating an account might be necessary as well as give you access to additional features. 

Dipity aggregates its data from on a “combination of search services and APIs to pull in content from across the web that has been posted to popular websites like YouTube, Flickr, Digg and DayLife” and is making available all timelines via RSS. What is really nice Dipity is that it allows merging two topics, or two timelines giving plenty of comparison opportunities to researchers. It does requires users to create an account though. 

Dipity also has some big plans for the near future. The website promises to come up soon with printing options as well as with more options for those users interested in generating their own timelines based on their own datasets. Furthermore, sharing and embedding options are also in the works. 

Finally, similar with the web visualization of Viewzi you can see your results in a website-flip format using SpaceTime3D

 TimeToast is among the newest timeline makers online and does exactly what is says: allows you to create timelines and share them on the web. Timelines can be bookmarked, shared or embedded.

It’s the same that XTimeline wants to do though being in a beta stage and having just recently launched there are no examples to look at yet. 

LifeSnapz would be, in my opinion, better for online collective photo albums since it allows multiple users to update the same timeline. It supports video and maps as well and has a comment options.  It is specially addressed to families but researchers looking into family genealogies or oral history projects might give it a thought. 

Finally, LifeBlob has more of a community feel to it but its offer is intended to reach beyond personal use, colleges, companies and researchers being invited to use the platform as well.  It has a different look, a bit more polished and professional compared to TimeToast but similar sharing options. Below is an example the platform provides. 

LifeBlob Academy Award for Best Actress’s Timeline:

Whatever your research, remember that web 2.0 always has a solution to visualize it.

IOCFSPD – closing words

While we should always be critical and realistic we should never be cynical. the IOC will do whatever it can for the nobel goal we are defending.