Interview with a Wolfram

Conrad Wolfram is a man dripping with ideas and innovation. He is also a decent, unassuming and thoroughly pleasant guy. He has a high powered vision of the world 'where computation meets knowledge.' Since May 2009, when it was released for general use, Wolfram Alpha has caused some waves. For the Wolfram brothers Stephen and Conrad, Alpha is less a search engine, more an answer engine, because it processes queries against structured data rather than simply presenting a list of pages or hyperlinks found through word-matching.

I had the pleasure to hear Conrad Wolfram give a keynote speech on semantic search at LearnTEC recently, and I was even more delighted when I got to sit with him on the train all the way back to the airport, and the opportunity to converse with him about semantic web, computation research, intelligent search and the nature of knowledge. A graduate of Cambridge University and now Strategic Director of Wolfram Research, Conrad has some marked ideas about technology and learning. He is also good friends with a number of luminaries in the world of computing including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. He drops their names into the conversation as if they are sitting across the room from us. Software engineer Theodore Gray is mentioned in the conversation, and we discuss how Wolfram research is developing. Conrad also tells me how he felt just before walking on stage to present his TED talk. We talk about how Wolfram's earlier intelligent knowledge engine Mathematica was founded. We talk about the future of knowledge, we touch on David McCandless' and Hans Rosling's amazing data visualisation tools, and we discuss the need for better understanding of how to use search terms. Time went by quickly and we parted company at Frankfurt Airport, promising to stay in touch. As I made my way over to the check in counters, my mind went back to his speech earlier in the day...

During his LearnTEC keynote, Conrad Wolfram (pictured left with conference chair Peter Henning and I) had given a live demonstration of both the Wolfram Alpha answer engine itself and also a new experimental site which 'I'm not supposed to show you just yet.' It is impressive stuff, with powerful computation that goes beyond simple interpretation of the words entered, generates 3 dimensional visualisation of data and promises the capability to automatically create widgets when the user asks the right questions. How old was Queen Victoria in 1890? It will give you the answer and then create a widget to deal with other, similar queries. Where is Victoria Falls? It provides a location map, and offers a number of geolocation options. The four pillars of WA, said Conrad Wolfram, were linguistic analysis, curated data, dynamic computation and computed presentation. If used correctly and intelligently, WA is indeed an extremely powerful research and computational tool.

Conrad Wolfram also had a lot to say about learning during his presentation. He argued that the value chain of knowledge is changing. By this he suggested that knowledge brokering is no longer the domain of the experts, but echoing sentiments of the wisdom of crowds and the power of tribes, he argued that repositories of knowledge can become even more powerful if they are searched intelligently and using visualisation computation. And as each new node and connection is created by individuals, a new democratisation of knowledge emerges - that is Wolfram's vision. 'If you drive yourself,' he said, 'you learn more about the route than you would if you are a passenger.' This suggests that most search engines make the enquirer a mere passenger in the journey to knowledge, whilst WA puts the enquirer firmly in the driving seat.

And what about education and Wolfram Alpha? He has a message for teachers: 'Stop teaching calculating', he advises, 'and start teaching maths.' The tools are already available for students to do calculation, what they now need, he states, is the ability to test things and verify results. The knowledge balance in schools, said Wolfram, is all wrong at present. There is too much knowledge giving and not enough opportunity for students to test things, experiment and discover for themselves.

Images by Gudrun Porath

Interview with a Wolfram by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The futures market

It was very refreshing to see the set up of LearnTEC in Karlsruhe, Germany this week. Billed as one of the largest learning technology trade fairs in Europe, it dwarfs the likes of mega conferences such as Online Educa Berlin, with well over 7000 visitors over the three days of the exhibition and conference. I was honoured to be invited to give a public keynote within the trade fair arena (see yesterday's post for more on this), and afterwards was inundated by requests for interviews and discussion. Several of the vendors also button-holed me to discuss my previous blogpost Upstairs downstairs, where I gave a critical report on the previous week's Learning Technologies Conference London exhibition. The ensuing discussion heated up the blogosphere for a while, with vendors defending their various positions, and practitioners giving their own views. To their credit, the vendors at this exhibition seemed to be a little more in contact with their training and teaching colleagues. I deliberately went around to the stands to question vendors on their approaches and examine their wares. I was pleasantly surprised by their candour and their openness.

The exhibition stands were very innovative (check out the human avatar above, who was not just entertaining to watch, but also informative when you talked to him) but also very much in touch with the zeitgeist - the current trends of learner centred training, user generated content, technology enrichment and interactive forms of education. I was impressed also by the way many of them wished to engage in discussion at the end of my keynote. Several vendors left their stands to crowd around the edge of the Bildungsforum where the public talks were held, so they could hear what I had to say, and perhaps make their own contribution to the public forum. Some were very concerned about the image of the conference exhibitor (they had already read my Upstairs downstairs blog post and knew who I was) and wished to quiz me on what I considered to be the needs of the learner right here, right now. I had several frank and fruitful discussions with them about learning needs, technology trends and emerging pedagogies. It was also interesting to see that many of the major vendors were notable by their absence from the event. The only major players I saw were SmartBoard and QuestionMark Perception - perhaps this is a clue about the success of the trade exhibition. It seems to me that the smaller companies have an eagerness to connect with the users to establish a foothold in the industry, and maybe this makes them a little more open to discussion and consultation.

LearnTEC certainly seems to have the balance right between academic discourse and vendor demonstrations. The way they were mixed within the same space, in a public and freely open environment seemed to work well. The discussion was rich and productive as a result. On a final note, the image on the left was taken of a stand in the middle of the exhibition - it was a reminder to everyone who walked past about where we have come from, and where we should never, ever, return to, because learning is about looking to the future, not the past. Take note, conference organisers - all of this is the future of the learning technology conference.

The futures market by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Heating the house or burning it down?

My public keynote yesterday in the trade fair arena at the LearnTEC Trade Fair and Conference in Karlsruhe, Germany was quite an experience. I wore a microphone headset which made me feel like an astronaut (but alas none could be found, despite the close proximity to Darmstadt European Space Agency Centre). The headset didn't make me look like Michael McIntyre, but it certainly gave me a lot of freedom to move around the audience and interact dynamically with them, and with over 300 people crowding in from all parts of the arena, we had an interesting and fast moving session. I presented a talk entitled: The future of learning: Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and the eXtended Web (Slideset here) which seemed to capture the mood of the conference. They like talking about the future here at LearnTEC, even if it is uncertain (the future, not LearnTEC - which seems to be growing from strength to strength, already in its 19th year, with 6000 exhibition visitors and 1200 conference delegates over the three day event).

I talked about how the Web, in all its incarnations, is changing the way learning can be conducted, and discussed the impact of mobile technologies. We touched on a number of new and emergent technologies including augmented reality (AR) and non-touch, natural gesture interfaces such as the XBox 360 Kinect and MIT's Sixth Sense wearable. At the end there was at least 15 minutes of questions and discussions, and I could tell from the questions that everyone seemed to be thinking deeply about what was being said. It was an ideal environment for this presentation, as hopefully the pictures above will show. To be deep in the heart of exhibitor land, and with many of the exhibitors leaving their stands to participate, just has to be a way forward in the context of the debate on the divide between vendor and practitioner (see the comments on my previous post for the discussion thread).

One of the comments from conference convenor Prof Peter Henning was that the discovery of fire was a game changer. I added in my response that perhaps it was not the discovery of fire that was so important, but the discovery of the ability to make fire. We discussed the disruptive innovation of the Gutenberg Press (invented so close to Karlsruhe, in Heidelberg) and its role �n democratising knowledge. Previous to movable type setting, publishing was extremely limited, but with the introduction of mass affordable publishing came the need to develop the entire population's literacy skills. My message to the audience was that with the introduction of social media and semantic web technologies, a new disruption is now occuring - and we now need new literacies - digital literacies for the entire population. We also discussed how to harness the excitement and richness of informal learning within formalised contexts, and how the future of learning will rely for its success on preparing young people not to learn facts (which are often outdated by the time students graduate) but to instill within them all the ability to learn how to learn, solve problems and adapt quickly to changing situations. The final message for the audience was that just as with fire, web tools have the capability to be used skillfully, or badly, and without care. We can either heat the home, or we can burn the house down.

Image source by Gudrun Porath


Heating the house or burning it down? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.