General reflections on the inaugural Turing Festival, Edinburgh

It is early on a Sunday morning at the end of August and most of the chairs upstairs at the Surgeon's Hall are empty. The repeated announcements that the last day of the Turing Festival was a sell-out suggest that, for many, late-night Fringe festival revelry was a more powerful draw than getting up for a third day of talks. I hoped that this third day of the festival would be more in the spirit of an amazing, geeky show-and-tell than the commercially-oriented programme of the first two days (which I had chosen not to attend out of equal parts disinterest and distaste for incessant start-up and commercialisation hype).

As the first speaker got started, I settled myself in with the hope of being excited and inspired by people doing innovative work. Ideally I would come away with some “ah-ha!” moments that I might apply to my own area of research, which is in multi-modal technologies for children with autism. Perhaps I might also get ideas for new ways to approach dissemination and public engagement. In any case, I wanted names to follow, links to click, food for thought. I had been happy to agree to provide some reflections on the event for the Interconnect newsletter,[1] and had some key questions jotted down in my notebook to guide my listening. Unfortunately, almost every single question remained unanswered at the end of the day.

While almost every speaker was passionate and knowledgeable, giving the audience plenty of food for thought and links to click, even talks in the same section of the programme felt entirely self-contained. There was little common ground between speakers, and little interaction with the audience. This audience was visibly varied and, from their questions, seemed to hail from many different disciplines and career trajectories. Their ages varied from postgrads to pensioners, and there was a better gender balance than I expected (about 1/3rd were women). Doubtless, the event might have been more dynamic if the audience were allowed more chances to interact with the speakers and content. Instead, there was a furious stream of #tfest tweets throughout the day to give some insight into how the politely applauding audience was really reacting. As I only got myself a “research Twitter” this summer (@a_m_alcorn0131), it was the first time I had attended an event that was being “live tweeted” as it happened. It was fascinating and frankly addictive[2] to be having a silent real-time conversation with the other audience members through the magic of smartphones and hashtags, and to see what complete strangers thought was most noteworthy about the presentations. Their tweets ranged from tweeting pithy direct quotes from David Britton, Tom Chatfield, and David McCandless, to arguing with Fraser Speirs over ipads in classrooms to the broad consensus that if only the Persuasion API speakers would stop giving us a boring and confused rehash of undergraduate social psychology, we could all go get some lunch. 

By the afternoon, the audience had filled in considerably for Tom Chatfield and David McCandless's talks. Apparently they have greater name recognition than many of the other speakers.

Overall, the quality and impact of the Sunday programme suffered considerably because it lacked cohesion and clear themes. Catchy but vague session titles like “Open Innovation at the Bleeding Edge” had little to do with the speakers' content. For example, the “Open Government” section of the programme might have been better titled something about personal data management. Although the speakers made interesting points about how much of administrative systems and data management are difficult to reform and streamline because they are indirectly—even accidentally--specified by other legislation, they were not government representatives. They promoted possible options for simplifying data management for both the government and citizens, but gave no information on what the government is actually doing (if anything) and what kind of results they aimed to achieve. These speakers might have been much more informative in chaired panel discussions on the title topics than they were individually, as was the case for most of the speakers all day. Only a few talks successfully stood alone--notably Sita Popat on robotics/dance, David McCandless on data journalism, and David Britton on the Large Hadron Collider—and seemed to have as their goal the celebration of innovations and collaborations which I had expected when signing up for the Turing Festival.

Dr. Sita Popat's talk on “Digital Bodies and Dancing Partners” succeeded especially well accessibly presenting fresh, interdisciplinary, and novel technology. Trained as a dancer, Dr. Popat entered academia after an injury and works at the intersection of dance, choreography, robotics, and performance. One video sequence showed a robotic arm as a dancing partner, which analysed a dancers’ movement and responded to its qualities (matching, opposing, following, etc.) to create a true impression of dancing with the human partner. Perhaps the most striking video examples showed how dancers have contributed to robotics research: engineers drawing madly as a dancer lay on the floor, moving her stiff limbs in an effort to imitate and extend the movements of a large insect-like robot beside her. The goal? To find out if the robot could use its legs in such a way as to stand. The exercise had been very successful, showing the engineers that their existing design was perhaps capable of much more than it had first appeared. Unfortunately, Dr. Popat said very little about how she arrived at (or created) this unusual field, and less about her personal views on these projects or involvement in science/technology more generally. 

Dr. Sita Popat describes how dancers have informed research into the potential movements for Zephyr, a stiff-legged and insect-like robot.

This idea of the STEM disciplines turning to the arts and humanities to inform their work was later continued persuasively by David McCandless, former TED-talker and self-professed data journalist of www.informationisbeautiful.net. His colourful and beautifully designed graphics and animations relate datasets to one another, so as to illustrate the differences in government spending in various areas, national debts, the relative size of countries’ armies, and other numbers that are usually presented in isolation from one another. This focus on the visual is not incidental, but the key to making sizes and relationships tangible and thought-provoking in a way that more traditional data presentations often do not. As McCandless noted, “Design is a powerful way to create trust and authority.” It is clear that regardless of your precise field or role, grasping how to deliver data in this way is an invaluable asset for communicating with colleagues, students, investors or the general public.

As a first-time event, Sunday’s Turing Festival had high points of insight, inspiration and humour, but was ultimately dragged down by uneven pacing and its complete lack of cohesion. Festival organisers, there are trade-offs between trying to have something for everyone and trying to have everything for a much narrower audience. For subsequent go-rounds, I hope that the organisers will either have a clearer and more obvious target audience, or will group (and name!) their content intelligently so that some sections are more clearly focused on development and commercialisation, public sector and non-profit groups, arts-related work, more “pure” research/science... etc. Subtitling your event “Edinburgh International Technology Festival” is so broad as to be in danger of foolishness: There is no way that everyone’s expectations can be met and interests can be catered for, unless you grow to be as big as the Edinburgh Science Festival. And that already has a lot of technology-related events. 

Despite my criticisms above, I think the event has huge potential and that there are many people in Scotland and further afield who have volumes to contribute in this area and should be encouraged to share their fascinating work with a wider audience of tech enthusiasts. In future years, a better understanding of the audience and a better structure (less lecturing, more discourse and interaction!) would doubtless make the event more compelling and better justify the price tag.


[1] Interconnect is an organisation for women in Scotland who are studying and working in STEM subjects. They put out a request on Twitter for someone to provide feedback about the Turing Festival event and I said I was happy to do so. Stay tuned to hear what happens to this piece and if it gets published!
[2] This second layer of the event was so addictive, in fact, that when my cell phone started dying I walked all the way across town on the lunch break in order to get my charger. In the rain! True story.

Commonplace books, blogs, and collected texts

I was delighted to click over to this short piece earlier today, which described a prevalent feature in the intellectual life of the enlightenment era: the commonplace book. This book was not "commonplace" as in ordinary, but the physical record of a practice known as commonplacing, in which readers copied out striking or important passages of work that they read, ideas, comments, and eventually, insights built up from this whole corpus of material. In a sense, it is engagement through appropriation into one's own personal corpus.

I think that I (and most actively reading, actively writing people that I know) engage in this process to some extent. Aside from hoarding journal paper printouts and PDFs, we rip out interesting magazine articles, may tape up inspirational or grounding quotes over our desks, and maybe write out or photocopy passages as well. Most of us also likely own many books which--perhaps unlike the enlightenment era thinkers--we view as disposable enough to mark up aggressively without confining ourselves to marginalia.

A quick googling of "commonplacing" directed me to a short article from the University of Chicago Library. Besides some pictures of commonplace books, it makes the important note that "While the commonplace book allowed readers to personalize their reading by making it useful, this process of textual engagement was also highly prescribed, "common" in the sense that it filtered one's reading through social norms that determined what was textually significant and what not." What I would be very interested to know is to what extent this modern process of appropriation and accrual is also mediated by social norms about textual significance. For example, might it feel embarrassing to copy out some lines from a paperback romance novel (however meaningful they were to you), in a way it would probably NOT be embarrassing to write down lines from Martin Luther King? What about jotting down passages from Harry Potter, a series that is very important to me and many others around the world? Despite its emotional resonance and cultural embeddedness, I think most of us would have a unspoken sense that Harry Potter is somehow "less significant" in terms of literary merit and ideas contained than are works in the established literary canon...regardless of whether we find this hierarchy of values personally true or not.

Questions of significance aside, I think that this practice of collecting, digesting, and re-arranging bits of text is very important for solidifying the ideas you have already encountered and preparing the ground for new ones to sprout. I would argue that this practice is perhaps even more important in the sciences than in the humanities, partly because it is so damn easy to waltz through a dense or technical text without absorbing very much of it. And then, you can't later find that key passage that you remember as phrasing a difficult concept so perfectly... Despite my trying to reduce the amazing quantity of paperwork that I drag around with me, I have gone back to keeping small notebooks full of passages and quotations for just this reason. I am sifting out the pieces that I think are useful to me as ideas, independently of the pressing pieces of project work that happens to be in front of me today. 

I disagree with the author of the piece in the first link ("Bring Commonplacing Back to Education") that a blog is the modern-day commonplace book. To be frank, that kind of aggregation of readings and thoughts had been my initial intent for this blog. However, I am dismayed to find that others cannot read my mind and discern my intent in a giant posted list of all the links I read today. While there is nothing to prevent me from posting this, it seems unsatisfying and frankly a bit pointless. A blog is generally written for an audience. While each individual post may be small, there is an expectation that it will convey some comprehensible message; random fragments of thought are seen as seen as hurried or thoughtless as best, and deliberately pretentious at worst. The modern commonplace book in the form of personal reading journal or research journal or folder of clippings has the creator/curator as its only audience-- no justification is necessary for the inclusion (or exclusion!) of certain content. Ideas do not need to be fully formed,  and can be annotated directly onto existing material as the writer sees fit. I think that a strength of this tool is its privateness and lack of audience, especially in higher education (or any realm, really) where there is continuous pressure to crank out ideas and arguments. Even worse, there is often enforced compartmentalisation of ideas with little demand for broader synthesis. Out of the spotlight, understanding has a chance to evolve at its own pace and crossbreed between genres as it will. Inviting public commentary on these processes, as possible in a blog, seems only to be replicating the type of environment to which the author hoped that the virtual commonplace book would be an antidote.

In conclusion, I now have a clearer picture of what I had already suspected: for peace of mind and productivity, it is wisest not to conflate this public blog with the private role of my scribbly, tatty notebook and its slips of paper!

Heriot Watt named Scottish University of the Year for 2011/2012

My current employer, Heriot Watt University, was recently named Scottish University of the Year for 2011/2012. Check out the university press release here.

I think my view of HW is always heavily coloured by having spent time at Edinburgh University first—it is certainly smaller in terms of the number of people/the name recognition, and it can be easy to forget that it has many first-rate people doing influential work (in my own main area of technology-enhanced learning, I’d like to give a shout-out here to Ruth Aylett and Judy Robertson, both of whom I greatly admire). Unfortunately, it is impossible to forget that it is dominated by extremely unfortunate 1960’s architecture.

Lacking the (sometimes totally undeserved!) name value of the University of Edinburgh, HW is working hard to be The Little University that Could. In several subjects the most recent university rankings have placed them very close to the top in all of the UK (I think chemistry is one of those). Furthermore, they are aggressively expanding their international presence, with a campus in Dubai and another just confirmed to begin construction at the invitation of the Malaysian government.

So, congratulations from me to HW and to all the people who are helping to make it successful in these times of very tough funding—the students keep coming, and so do the research dollars pounds/euros!

Upcoming events: September-October 2011

I'm going to be attending all kinds of exciting stuff this fall semester! Even though I'm not officially in school (Uni, whatever), I can still work on getting edumacated. This is not to say that I don't learn anything the rest of the time-- I read academic papers and reference books for work just about every week, and have the highly illuminating the hands-on experiences of working with children + technology, and playing project politics.

Tomorrow, September 8th: SCERTS framework follow-up day 
(University of Birmingham)
 I am a big fan of the SCERTS framework for autism intervention, having gone to the big three-day training session last September with one of the SCERTS founders and authors, Emily Rubin, and then having used elements of SCERTS within the ECHOES project. Emily Rubin will also be leading this day, with many of the same attendees from last time. The goal is for people to present examples of using SCERTS in practice and to get feedback. ECHOES has submitted some video/written material for Emily to view and comment on later, at the end of the day. I am a bit nervous, as she will look at the ECHOES video coding scheme (which we have based on the assessment process and behavioural goals in SCERTS). As I have written almost the entirety of that document, I feel like I am somewhat on the line here-- I really hope she approves!

A few words describing SCERTS, excerpted from my intro to the video coding document:

SCERTS is most accurately called a framework rather than an intervention programme in its own right, because it is compatible with a range of other approaches and interventions already in use with people on the autism spectrum, such as TEACCH (Schopler & Mesibov, 1995), the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS, Bondy & Frost 1994), and many others.

SCERTS stands for Social Communication, Emotional Regulation, and Transactional support, the three main areas on which it focuses for helping children to achieve social and communicative competence, and for helping social partners (e.g. teachers, parents, peers) to support the child in achieving this competence. The SCERTS curriculum targets the “core deficits” of autism which are usually an impediment to social and communicative competence by setting specific, developmentally appropriate goals. These may be both educational goals, and identifying transactional supports (changes to child’s environment, and to social partners’ interactions) which help the child to achieve the target goals. For a summary of some of the main goals/targeted areas in the SCERTS framework, see Table 1, reproduced from a paper by Prizant, Wetherby, Rubin, and Laurent (2003). The curriculum is designed to be administered by a team across all of the child’s usual settings—not only the child’s teacher and other school staff, but family members and even peers. The entire team ideally uses the same methods for supporting and communicating with the child, and is aware of that child’s behavioural goals and progress toward them.

Friday, September 9th: One-day conference on Autism Education
(University of Birmingham)
From the official conference materials: "This conference on autism and education brings together leading experts from the UK and the USA who will present some of the latest developments in education research and practice. The particular focus of this event will be to showcase and discuss some of the critical ways in which children with autism can be assessed in school settings and how these assessments of progress can be related to meaningful targets, particularly for adult life."

I am hoping to further inform one of my still-nebulous PhD project ideas. Specifically, finding out about good resources and strategies for embedding technology and other intervention programmes into classroom practice. "Embedding" technology in educational practice is a current big topic in the AIED (artificial intelligence in education) community, partly because it has been realised that the most successful project are those which are embedded, and also because that community is becoming savvier to what the education research people have known all along: teachers are an invaluable research resource in terms of contributing to what you build, and how, not just what to do with it now it's finished. Anyway, I digress.

October 12th, SICSA Workshop for Technology on Health & Wellbeing
Glasgow Caledonian University
I don't know as much about this event as yet, but I will say that I am not presenting anything, and I don't think anyone else from ECHOES will be either. However, it still  might be useful/informative to me so I am happy to go along and be the attentive audience! Health technology seems like it will be increasingly important in the future, especially as the population ages. I also think it is likely to mutate significantly, along with other changes in the fields of pervasive, ubiquitous and mobile computing in increasingly "smart" environments.