I have received in the post today a certificate recognizing me as a Fellow if the Higher Education Academy as evidence of my “expertise and commitment to enhancing and supporting the student learning experience”.

This certificate is linked to a post-graduate course I have taken last year focusing on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. The course gave me a more methodological approach to the teaching process which I have applied when upgrading the design of the new media course I teach in Belgium at Katho.

I had a video guest lecture to Florida Southern College, to the class of Dr Chris Fenner. I talked about the Olympic Movement and new media from a historical perspective. Questions about the impact of emerging technologies on society in general and the Olympic experience in particular were asked.

Unlike my previous guest lectures, given to the University of Missouri-Columbia or the University of Kansas, that were done via Skype, we used a browser-based solution: TokBox. Some technical difficulties made things more challenging but the sound and video quality when the internet connection functioned at full speed were very good. The platform also enabled embedding a Slideshare presentation reducing thus the hassle of figuring out how to present additional material while keeping the video on screen.

The presentation is below:

I believe the class was a novelty for the students as well as for the college as a whole. Students engaged with me both by answering and asking questions and they seemed to genuinely enjoy the lecture. This shows that there is some great potential in integrating live video into traditional in-class, on-campus lectures.

Many thanks to Chris Fenner and James Lynch for making this possible.

Back in May when in Lausanne, Switzerland I blogged and tweeted live from  IOC’s first ever International Forum on Sport, Peace and Development (IFSPD).  Just recently my review of the same event has been published in Culture @ the Olympics.

Researchers in Europe would definitely benefit from including in their work routines some online collaborative tools. In this post I intend to present some of the collaborative platforms that allow sharing and live working on documents I have discovered during the past months. They are Google Docs, Socialtext, Colaab, OneHub and Scribblar.

Out of all the platforms above I am most familiar with GoogleDocs. Their interface is easy to use, has an auto-saver and supports the regular formats with which researchers work: spreadsheets, presentations, word documents. It does require a Google account but once created that account offers access to many more Google resources. Collaboration can take place in real-time due to the embedded chat and users can change and amend documents if given permission by the one who uploaded them. I haven’t figured out yet whether there is a “track changes” function in Google Docs but I believe such a feature would be useful both when users deal with lengthy documents as well as when there is a large number of users with permission to make changes. Also, for those into photo/video collaboration Google Docs does not yet offer any support. For more features check their page.

For academic purposes, Google Docs is a good solution: is free, allows protection of documents, replicates functionalities of traditional software and allows real-time conversations. A short video on how it works can be found on YouTube.

Real-time multi-user whiteboard, image upload and download, live audio and instant messaging are features offered by Scribblar as well. For those in a hurry Scribblar offers the opportunity of using the platform straight away without any ID with, of course, some restrictions on the features available. Creating an account however is free and doesn’t take long. Scribblar also offers a pro version which can be integrated in e-learning sites.

Colaab supports a variety of resources formats, as they call them: from doc and docx (the vista word version) , powerpoint and pdf to images (png, jpg, gif,psd), videos and xps. The platform allows a user to have multiple projects and share them with multiple users. There are notification when users log into the platform as well as their a track changes log which makes it easy to see who, when and where within a project added a comment or an annotation. The advantage of Colaab, as I see it,  lies within its video and photo collaboration opportunities as it enables, among others, quick zoom into large files.  Colaab therefore can be a great platform for arts and creative media schools. In terms of access, Colaab has 4 packages ranging from 0 to 99 USD a month. You can sign up for a 30-day trial as well. To take a tour of the platform and check its other features go here.

OneHub is similar with Colaab in that that is allows users to work on multiple projects, or spaces but the platform is richer in features. Unlike Colaab, OneHub is designed as an enterprise solution and therefore focuses more on offering tools that can support project management and file sharing besides collaboration. OneHub has, for example, a calendar function that enables users to keep track of their projects and deadlines. It also has a hub activity log where the other users actions can be followed (Colaab offers this as well). The platform also supports folder sharing, hub search and has a lot of customization options which might be useful for joint projects or for projects where universities outsource their services to for-profit companies. There is a 30-day trial but no free account possibility. Take a tour of OneHub here.

Socialtext describes itself as a social software platform than can work both as a hosted or as an on-site service. The platform seems much more complex than all the previous ones described promising to offer different solution packages for specific business functions. Socialtext 3.0 extends collaboration to its maximum – there is a dashboard, wiki workspaces, blogs, opportunities for social networking and messaging as well as distributed spreadsheets (this allows spreadsheets to be dynamic by allowing data to be easily interlinked). Furthermore Socialtext is available offline as well as from a mobile device. As with the other platforms there is a 30-day trial but also a free account version that can accommodate up to 50 users with, of course, some restrictions – there is only 1 wiki space available, there are no distributed spreadsheets included in the package and there is no service or support from the Socialtext team. A product demo can be seen here.

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:

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:

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

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.

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.

The report is based on the presentations, speeches and keynote addresses given yesterday and today. Lord Colin Moynihan is now reading some ideas from Jacques Rogge’s, IOC President, address from yesterday and it looks like he’ll continue to summarize the presentations of yesterday, or at lest that he was made responsible to report on. He is reviewing also the questions posed during the sessions. 

Patrick Bauman, from Switzerland, is now giving his review, starting with Frankie Fredericks presentation from yesterday. 

It is often stressed, as in the days and hours before, the positive example that sport provides and the dangers of inactive youth highlighted by reminding some of the alarming data from the WHO presentation. Dr Talbot’s presentation is again addressed, after Lord Moynihan just mentioned through a joke that he didn’t agree with it, making me think that the issue of gender and sex stereotyping in the world of sports although told me dealt with without discrimination is still rather a taboo. 

Lord Moynihan now started to speak again reviewing the morning talks. Mr Verbruggen’s keynote is mentioned for its ideas on legacy and the IOCs need to engage and collaborate with political bodies and figures to help IOCs mission but no word is said about Verburggen’s mention that certain NGO, pushing their agenda, tried to make the IOC accountable for human rights issues around the world. 

Erica Terpstra, chair of this morning’s session on legacy and education, is speaking now about the other great speakers from her panel: Mario Pescante, Ser Miang Ng and Markus Pilgrim concluding that the meetings these days were a call to action.

Mr Bauman now continues summarizing the last session, the one I missed due to another commitment, that was about capitalizing on partnerships and networking.Political nationalism may sometime be excessive but unavoidable in the Olympic Games, according to Yasushi Akashi, former UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator and now Chairman of the Japan Centre for Conflict Prevention. Other presentations focused o the aid for development through sport, two speakers bring relatively different views – Dr Pal Schmidt, IOC Vice-President and EU Parliament member bringing the Eu view while Mr Subramonia Anathakrishnan, Chief of Partners and Youth Branch of UN-Habitat bringing the UN-habitat view. The last presentation of the last session was given by Christopher Lamb, Special Adviser, International Relations, International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. He advised checking the content and motivation of the partners and not be content only with the memos and partnerships signed. 

Many examples from and related to African countries were given throughout the days making me think that Africa as a general topic is increasingly important for the IOC and probably becoming as much of a focus as the dramatic decrease of involvement in physical activities by youths. 

The recommendations, some of them, presented by Lord Moyniham, are therefore as follows:

1. stress the importance of the first ever holding of this forum – emphasize that sport has the power to enhance peace building 

2. the Olympic Movement (OM) and its partners cooperate whenever possible to use sport to overcome increasing problems of this world 

4. the OM will use its influence to political influence to promote peace 

5. OM supports dialogue between nations and individuals and strive to achieve dignity for all individual and people

6. seek  to promote equal opportunities for women as a fundamental human right

7. the OM should strive to achieve peace through the works of the Olympic Truce 

12. this first forum, should be the first step towards future addition of other such meetings not further than two years apart

These, and the other recommendations, were approved by applause by those in the room.