Nick Pearce, Special Adviser on Education to the Prime Minister, spent this morning in KMi, hosted by the Vice-Chancellor Prof. Brenda Gourley. He came to learn about how the OU is supporting learners online, and how it envisages the future of the OU and the Higher Education sector in the era of free Open Educational…
KMi’s Compendium tool supports rapid visual mapping of dialogues and debates through a mix of visual language, tagging and hypermedia structuring. With a track record of use in the workplace, we are now beginning to build evidence of its potential for critical thinking in schools. With >40,000 downloads and an annual workshop, KMi supports an…
I’m delighted to say that the Global Sensemaking network has just gone public, after several months of community building under the radar. Global Sensemaking (GSm) is a group of people dedicated to helping humanity address complex, interrelated global problems-such as climate change, energy policy, poverty, and food security-by developing and applying new web-based technology to…
I’ve just returned from an intensive ‘Perspectives’ workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl, 2.5 hours out of Frankfurt. This brought together European and US leaders in both argumentation theory and systems development to debate the state of the art, and the future challenges to delivering argumentation-support technology on the web and other intelligent systems. We worked in…
120 Year 5+6 pupils (9-11 yr olds) at Bushfield School in Wolverton gathered last week to hear about KMi’s work with NASA in anticipation of future manned missions to Mars. We had a great assembly with Earthlings battling out quizzes with Martians, movies from the historic NASA lunar missions and the current Mars MER mission,…
Cohere [http://cohereweb.net] is a new web-centric knowledge mapping tool from the Knowledge Media Institute’s Open Sensemaking Communities project, working as part of the OU-wide OpenLearn initiative: Cohere enables learners, researchers and analysts to: record ideas, and add relevant websites make meaningful connections between ideas visualize the emerging network of your ideas, and the world’s, in…
Last week I co-chaired the 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web. This is an exciting new community working at the intersection of social software, collaboration, discourse and the negotiation of meaning. There is as yet no single, agreed definition of "Pragmatic Web" – it is serving as a banner around which an eclectic network…
As part of a national programme to exploit e-science technologies in the Arts & Humanities, we are extending our Memetic toolkit for recording, replaying and annotating dance sessions in the Access Grid, to create tools for choreographers to rehearse and perform distributed compositions. The KMi component is extending and integrating Hypermedia Discourse tools such as…
Last week I gave an invited talk on the opening day of the 15th International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS 2007). Fundamentally, their focus is on computational representations that are also cognitively tractable, hence the invitation to forge a link with our work on usable tools for the network-centric mapping of dialogue and arguments. The…
Amidst stiff competition, a KMi bid has emerged as one of only 7 funded in an innovative AHRC-EPSRC-JISC eScience programme funded by the three agencies. In a 2 year project starting in Oct. 2007, KMi will work with choreographers at Univ. Bedfordshire and Leeds, and long-term partners Univ. Manchester, to break new ground in the…
