JISC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES Project Document …€¦ · Memetic – Final Report – 1.0 – February 2007 Page 1 of 16 JISC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES Project Document Cover Sheet FINAL

Memetic – Final Report – 1.0 – February 2007

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JISC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES

Project Document Cover Sheet

FINAL REPORT

Project Project Acronym Memetic Project ID Project Title Meeting Memory Technology Informing Collaboration Start Date 1 Feb 2005 End Date 31 Dec 2006 Lead Institution University of Manchester Project Directors Terry Hewitt, University of Manchester; Simon Buckingham Shum, Open

University; David De Roure, University of Southampton; Tim Chown, University of Southampton; Rob Procter, University of Edinburgh/University of Manchester

Project Manager & contact details

Michael Daw e-mail: [email protected] 0161 275 7026

Partner Institutions Open University

University of Southampton

University of Edinburgh

Project Web URL http://www.memetic-vre.net/ Programme Name (and number)

Virtual Research Environments Programme

Programme Manager Frederique VanTill

Document Document Title Final Report Reporting Period 1 February 2005 – 31 December 2006 Author(s) & project role Michael Daw (Project Manager), Danius Michaelides, Rob Procter, Simon

Buckingham Shum (Directors), Roger Slack, Andrew Rowley, Michelle Bachler, Clara Mancini, Ben Juby (Developers)

Date February 2007 Filename URL N/A Access Project and JISC internal X General dissemination

Document History Version Date Comments

1.0 13 February 2007 Initial version


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Table of Contents Project ..................................................................................................................................................... 1

Document ................................................................................................................................................ 1

Document History .................................................................................................................................... 1

Table of Contents .................................................................................................................................... 2

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. 2

Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................ 2

Background ............................................................................................................................................. 3

Aims and Objectives ............................................................................................................................... 4

Methodology ............................................................................................................................................ 4

Implementation ........................................................................................................................................ 5

Outputs and Results ................................................................................................................................ 6

Outcomes and Lessons Learned ............................................................................................................ 7

Dissemination .......................................................................................................................................... 7

Conclusions ............................................................................................................................................. 9

Implications and Sustainability ................................................................................................................ 9

Recommendations ................................................................................................................................ 10

References ............................................................................................................................................ 11

Appendix A: Memetic in Use ................................................................................................................. 13

Acknowledgements Memetic was funded by JISC under the Virtual Research Environments programme. The project was a collaboration between the Universities of Manchester, Southampton, Edinburgh and the Open University.

Executive Summary The project name 'Memetic' is both an acronym and a word. Memetic stands for Meeting Memory Technology Informing Collaboration, which emphasises its original aim to develop software to expedite the meeting process by enabling annotated recordings of distributed Access Grid meetings that allow the review of those meetings by navigation through index points of key moments, such as agenda items, decisions, actions, questions and ideas, and also by who was speaking at a particular point in time. As well as providing a descriptive acronym, Memetic is also a word in itself, from the term 'meme', coined by the zoologist and evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins, which refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another, such as tunes, catch-phrases, or ways of building arches. Memetic as a word rather than as an acronym proved to be more illustrative of its eventual use for recording cultural information from a wide set of session scenarios beyond meetings, such as seminars, virtual ethnography and as a tool to aid the evaluation of performance


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art. The ‘memes’ generated in the course of an Access Grid session are no longer ephemeral, but are stored and indexed for subsequent access.

There are three stages in using Memetic: book, record and replay. These are all accessed via a web-based user interface. The purpose of the booking stage is to enable the capture of metadata associated with a session such as its title, date/time, participants and agenda, to make that session known to the system, and optionally to set a timer to record the session (see Figure 1 in Appendix A).

The recording stage involves not only the pressing of the record button (much the same as on a VCR), but also the opportunity of annotating the session whilst in progress. This involves the use of two integrated applications: Compendium and ScreenStreamer. Compendium is a concept-mapping tool, which exists as standalone software in its own right and has an international, highly active user community. Compendium can be used in a variety of ways to annotate the session, from simple use by a participant marking index points in the session which will benefit from later review, to a replacement for meeting minutes, in which are captured many elements of a discussion, such as details of questions raised, ideas proposed, pros and cons of those ideas, decisions, action items, and so on (see Figure 2). Compendium makes use of graphical icons to identify the nature of these different elements in a session, such as a question mark for a question and a light bulb for an idea; however, these icons are customisable, which makes the tool applicable for many different session types, for example, one of our users investigated the use of Compendium icons based on Bales' interaction analysis for research into enquiry-based learning (see Figure 3).

ScreenStreamer was a tool developed by the project to allow a session participant to broadcast the contents of their computer screen to other participants. This is particularly useful for displaying the Compendium map, presentation slides, or other documents or software used during the session. The particular value of ScreenStreamer over other methods of sharing the screen, such as VNC or Microsoft NetMeeting, is that the media stream from ScreenStreamer is recordable by Memetic alongside other video and audio from the session. During the latter stages of the project, ScreenStreamer was enhanced to become an additional source of automated session annotations based on the contents of the screen being streamed, for example slide changes during a seminar presentation (see Figure 4).

The replay stage of Memetic is for users who wish to review sessions. The replay shows every video and audio stream that was present in the original session, together with the ScreenStreamer stream(s) and relevant Compendium map. The replay is accessible either in an Access Grid virtual venue, or on a user's desktop. The session is navigable by VCR-type functionality, such as play, fast forward, rewind and pause; by dragging the 'now bar' across the session timeline; and by session annotation, such as Compendium icon, agenda item, presentation slide, and person speaking (although the last requires manual annotation after the session) (see Figure 5). During the replay, the user can make further annotations using Compendium.

The Memetic project incorporated extensive involvement from a number of users, including the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute at the University of Southampton, the Locating Grid workshops at the University of Bristol, the Welsh e-Science Centre at Cardiff University, the History of Political Discourse VRE at the Universities of Hull & East Anglia, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre at the University of Edinburgh, the Freeman Centre at the Universities of Sussex & Brighton, and assorted seminar users at Bristol, Manchester and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Many of these used the software for unexpected applications, such as the evaluation of performance art in the Locating Grid workshops, which pushed Memetic in disruptive ways (see Figure 6). The project included continuous engagement with users, including the elicitation of user requirements and an end-of-project evaluation of the software in use (see Figure 7).

Background Meetings pervade the life of almost all researchers, and increasingly, these take the form of telephone and videoconferences amongst geographically dispersed colleagues. Supporting distributed meetings that are as productive as face-to-face meetings is a primary challenge for research and development in this field, and takes on a new importance as we recognise the potentially catastrophic environmental impact of global travel that could be reduced if the experience of virtual meetings were


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good enough. This was the motivation for Memetic; however, as described elsewhere, we quickly discovered a demand for Memetic in scenarios beyond meetings, such as evaluation of performance art, seminars, and ethnography.

Memetic combines two important areas of previous work: Access Grid and the e-Science CoAKTinG project, funded in association with the EPSRC AKT-IRC (Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration: www.aktors.org). The Access Grid is a collaboration environment based around a rich videoconferencing experience with the potential to add various applications in addition to multiple streams of video and audio for participants to share. The e-Science CoAKTinG project’s tools are designed to help with personal and collective information management, and in particular, to improve meetings with a visual trace of discussions, access to rationale and documents from previous meetings, and meeting replays that are indexed to support navigation. The initial aim of Memetic was to marry the meeting replay functionality of CoAKTinG to the Access Grid to provide a tool for recording and annotating distributed meetings in an Access Grid environment.

The context for the integration is that while Access Grid provides an environment that already satisfies many of the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) capabilities proposed to date, many researchers currently use the technology as little more than a videoconferencing tool. Moreover, while video provides a rich communication medium for humans, it is hard for machines to interpret, and difficult for humans to browse for points of interest. To counterbalance this, the CoAKTinG tools provided a structured annotation layer over video that enables computational support for accessing information about the meeting participants and relevant documents. Uniquely, because ideas can be concept-mapped in real time, computational services have access to the contents of discussions in meetings, and can navigate meetings by topic for replay.

Aims and Objectives The aim agreed at the start of this project was to develop, deploy and evaluate CoAKTinG-enriched Access Grid virtual venues designed to augment both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration in videoconferences.

The specific objectives agreed were:

• Extend the Access Grid's VRE infrastructure with new collaboration functionalities from the CoAKTinG project

• Provide a set of extensions to CoAKTinG tools to make their installation and administration simpler in both an Access Grid and non-Access Grid context

• Observe the use of and evaluate the improved VRE with end-user communities.

These aims and objectives remained the same throughout the project and all were satisfied, although their specific implementation changed and application domains widened according to user demands. The project name was also established during the project, which meant a change of terminology.

Methodology The primary aim of Memetic was to develop and deliver software that meets user needs. In the early stages of the project, most of the effort was placed on ensuring that the core applications were robust and usable to provide a solid platform for the delivery of enhanced functionality. This was based on the application of a number of standards for the technology and coding implementation as well as strict application of Quality Assurance procedures (such as reviews and testing) to ensure robustness. The process for application development followed the stages of: requirements capture, in the form of meetings with end-users and observations of end-users engaged in using the project technology; design, in the form of internal project documents and presentations; development, which was subject to peer code reviews and testing; and deployment and evaluation among end-users to yield increased robustness through actual usage, bug reporting and feature requests. It should be noted that these stages were not necessarily followed in strict order, and there was some iteration to allow user feedback from the deployment stage into further development.


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When the software reached a certain level of maturity, our strategy evolved to include end-users as much as possible both in the process of requirements capture for enhanced functionality and in the real-world testing of the applications. Our user community covered a number of diverse disciplines to help ensure that Memetic had as generic an application as possible.

The end-user evaluation incorporated both ethnographic observation by experts in this field on the project team and long-term engagement with users comprising an approach known as co-realisation, which conceptualises design as a co-operative process where end-users and developers are equal partners. There is more detail on this subject in our final end-user evaluation document.

This methodology was successful in that it resulted in robust software that has been found to be beneficial to many users. In future projects, we believe it would be useful to extend these concepts to involve an even closer, more formalised, relationship with users, for example, by addressing the issues of enfranchisement, so that end users can more clearly see what benefits accrue from being involved in the development process; hypothecation, whereby some project funds are set aside to pay end user partners for their involvement (which is also more likely to ensure their commitment); and synergy, where end users see the benefit of Memetic for their own work on other projects and use it within what becomes a hybrid framework. We note that some of these issues have been addressed in the more formalised involvement of users in the framework for phase two of the VRE programme.

Implementation Planning for the project work involved breaking down each work package into discrete activities that could be more easily tracked to assess progress. The team had monthly project meetings to discuss progress, dissemination activities, planning for particular project events and to raise any issues arising. Meetings were held using Access Grid plus Compendium and, later, by using Memetic ourselves so that we could experience the software from a user perspective. Ad hoc meetings were also arranged between developers at Manchester, Southampton and the Open University to discuss development issues, testing and reviews.

Software development followed best practice by adherence to programming guidelines and collaboration between developers based at the different partner institutions.

User involvement was initiated and maintained through workshops and induction sessions (both face-to-face and via Access Grid+Compendium) with individual groups. The first workshop held with users was a requirements gathering exercise to determine the nature of the functionality to be developed leading to a 'wish list' and to help us prioritise activities. When the software had reached a certain maturity, a briefing workshop was held to introduce the toolkit to users. This was followed by induction sessions, which were more in-depth, hands-on experiences held with a small number of users, the aim of which was to provide sufficient knowledge to apply Memetic in daily work situations and to ensure a higher level of 'buy-in' from users.

Our user evaluation consisted of one-to-one interviews with users, visits to observe users at work, virtual ethnography and an end-of-project 'celebration', which provided an opportunity to showcase the software, explain our future direction and to elicit further feedback and perspectives on project outcomes.

The main problems and issues that arose throughout the project concerned user involvement, specifically in engaging and retaining users. Whilst our list of end-user partners at the end of the project was broadly similar to the list at the start there were several differences, due to a lack of involvement from some users who initially signed up to the project and unexpected involvement from users recruited at dissemination events, such as conferences. The activity of enlisting enthusiastic users entailed a larger amount of work than was originally envisaged and we have concluded that a strategy of enfranchisement, hypothecation, and synergy (described in the Methodology section) would prove beneficial in future projects.

One feature of the project was increased user involvement towards its conclusion. This could have been because the technology became more ‘mature’ and robust as the project went on and users were more able to realise its potential.


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Making Memetic work in real-life situations also proved to be problematic in some instances, where contingencies needed to be resolved. These contingencies were both technical, such as the need for intervention of network staff to open firewalls, and organisational, such as decisions on whose responsibility in a meeting scenario it was to use Memetic – the Chair, the person taking minutes, or the organiser. Where these were successfully resolved, Memetic has found a niche and has been well regarded.

Outputs and Results Project outputs from Memetic comprise a software toolkit to enable users to record, annotate and replay sessions held using Access Grid and its associated documentation (in the project plan, these were outputs 1-12 and 16), as well as user-related documents, namely a requirements report (output 13), briefing materials (output 14) and a final evaluation (output 15).

Memetic Toolkit There are three stages in using the Memetic toolkit: book, record and replay. These are accessed via a web-based user interface. The purpose of the booking stage is to enable the capture of metadata associated with a session such as its title, date/time, participants and agenda, to make that session known to the system, and optionally to set a timer to record the session (see Figure 1 in Appendix A).

The recording stage involves not only the pressing of the record button (much the same as on a VCR), but also the opportunity of annotating the session whilst in progress. This involves the use of two integrated applications: Compendium and ScreenStreamer. Compendium is a concept-mapping tool, which exists as standalone software in its own right and has an international, highly active user community. Compendium can be used in a variety of ways to annotate the session, from simple use by a participant marking index points in the session which will benefit from later review, to a replacement for meeting minutes, in which are captured many elements of a discussion, such as details of questions raised, ideas proposed, pros and cons of those ideas, decisions, action items, and so on (see Figure 2). Compendium makes use of graphical icons to identify the nature of these different elements in a session, such as a question mark for a question and a light bulb for an idea; however, these icons are customisable, which makes the tool applicable for many different session types, for example, one of our users investigated the use of Compendium icons based on Bales' interaction analysis for research into enquiry-based learning (see Figure 3).

ScreenStreamer was a tool developed by the project to allow a session participant to broadcast the contents of their computer screen to other participants. This is particularly useful for displaying the Compendium map, presentation slides, or other documents or software used during the session. The particular value of ScreenStreamer over other methods of sharing the screen, such as VNC or Microsoft NetMeeting, is that the media stream from ScreenStreamer is recordable by Memetic alongside other video and audio from the session. During the latter stages of the project, ScreenStreamer was enhanced to become an additional source of automated session annotations based on the contents of the screen being streamed, for example slide changes during a seminar presentation (see Figure 4).

The replay stage of Memetic is for users who wish to review sessions. The replay shows every video and audio stream that was present in the original session, together with the ScreenStreamer stream(s) and relevant Compendium map. The replay is accessible either in an Access Grid virtual venue, or on a user's desktop. The session is navigable by VCR-type functionality, such as play, fast forward, rewind and pause; by dragging the 'now bar' across the session timeline; and by session annotation, such as Compendium icon, agenda item, presentation slide, and person speaking (although the last requires manual annotation after the session) (see Figure 5). During the replay, the user can make further annotations using Compendium.

Documentation associated with the toolkit can be found in its help pages. Annotated screencasts showing the replay user interface in action are on the project’s website: http://www.memetic-vre.net/software/Memetic/Screencasts


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User-related Documents User-related documents comprise of a requirements report, briefing materials and a final evaluation. The requirements report was created following a workshop where possible functionality for Memetic was explored, facilitated and captured live in Compendium. The main section in the requirements report was a prioritised 'wish list' of developments to be implemented during the project. The briefing materials were designed to introduce users to Memetic prior to its use in workplace scenarios. The final evaluation was a substantial document authored by the team's professional social scientist and other evaluation experts that examined the approach used by the project, issues encountered, and ways that these may be resolved in future work.

Outcomes and Lessons Learned Memetic has succeeded in producing a flexible and robust software toolkit that is capable of supporting a number of research-based scenarios: Access Grid videoconferences are no longer restricted only to those who can attend live, but can be recorded and replayed using VCR-style controls, or via the novel indexing and navigation tools offered in the Meeting Replay tool.

Although the impact of Memetic is currently small, the potential is large. There are a small number of user groups who have experienced the software in real-life, many of whom have been enthusiastic. There were a few user groups who were about to increase usage of the software towards the end of the project, and these will be supported on a best-efforts basis. It is only in the latter stages of the project that the software became robust and reliable enough for usage to increase and the project team are actively pursuing avenues for a continuation of Memetic, both in terms of development (proposals have been made to the second phase of the VRE programme and to the recent AHRC e-Science call) and for rollout of a Memetic service to the UK Access Grid community via the Access Grid Support Centre. With the increasing need for hybrid synchronous and asynchronous teamwork across timezones, we believe that Memetic has the potential to increase the usefulness of Access Grid, particularly in meeting and seminar-type scenarios, but also in wider use of the camera-rich and excellent audio offered by Access Grid facilities, for example, for ethnographic or focus group uses. Our final evaluation report offers lessons learned that may be applicable to other projects.

As stated in other sections of this document (Methodology and Implementation), the main element of the work that may have benefited from a different approach was our work with user groups. There were issues related to engaging and retaining users and in resolving technological and organisational contingencies. In future projects, we believe it would be useful to involve a closer, more formalised, relationship with users, for example, by addressing the issues of enfranchisement, so that end users can more clearly see what benefits accrue from being involved in the development process; hypothecation, whereby some project funds are set aside to pay end user partners for their involvement (which is also more likely to ensure their commitment); and synergy, where end users see the benefit of Memetic for their own work on other projects and use it within what becomes a hybrid framework.

Dissemination Copies of all papers may be viewed on the project website, at http://www.memetic-vre.net/publications/

Conference/Journal Comments

Persistent Conversation mini-track at International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS 39)

Although not accepted, two of the three reviewers of this early paper expressed the hope that we submit again to a subsequent conference after further work has been completed

Access Grid Retreat 2005 Paper was well-received and helped to spread awareness of our work. Comments were used to feed


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into the requirements gathering process

SC Global 2005 Paper was well-received and helped to spread awareness of our work.

All Hands e-Science Meeting 2005 Paper was well-received and helped to spread awareness of our work.

International Conference on e-Social Science 2005

Demonstration as part of JISC VRE stand. Well-received and yielded an ongoing discussion with a new potential end-user

Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP'06)

This full conference paper is the first detailed description of the Memetic system’s rationale and user interface. Our work fitted the conference theme perfectly: “seamless integration of artefacts and conversations" and was extremely well received as an example of collaboration technology that combines multimedia richness with semiformal semantics.

Access Grid Support Centre Training Workshop

A session at both January and July AGSC training workshops focussed on Memetic to introduce the technology to the UK Access Grid community

International Conference on e-Social Science 2006

Memetic was presented as part of two workshops – those on VRE and semantic technologies. A separate paper was also presented as part of the main conference on use of Memetic as a tool for virtual ethnography. Interest was high in each of these forums and may yield new users.

Ariadne Web Magazine, Issue 49, October 2006

Memetic featured in a review of a VRE workshop at the International Conference on e-Social Science 2006. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue49/e-collab-rpt/

Workshop on Usability Challenges for e-Science/Cyberinfrastructure, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2006)

This paper at the premier international conference on human-centred computing outlined the user-centred research orientation of Memetic to supporting e-Science meetings. Compendium was used live to capture the plenary discussions, subsequently posted to the web.

First International Workshop on Semantic Technologies in Collaborative Applications (STICA 06)

This paper was a description of the technical aspects of Memetic, focussing on our use of Semantic Web technologies. There were a number of other application-based papers in the workshop but Memetic was alone in tackling real-time collaboration. The paper was well received and a number of participants expressed interest in learning more about our tools.

Design Rationale: Problems and Progress, Workshop in conjunction with Second International Conference on

This paper summarised the 15 year development of software support for issue-based rationale capture, from the initial research prototype in the late 1980s, to a product in the early 90s, to the Compendium tool from


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Design Computing & Cognition 2000, to the leading edge Memetic system which integrates issue maps with meeting videos.

MMAD: First International Workshop on Modelling Meetings, Argumentation & Discourse

Memetic are sponsors for this workshop, chaired by one of the Memetic PI’s, in conjunction with the 1st International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (University of Liverpool, UK, 11-12 Sept. 2006). The workshop brought together leading research in meeting capture and indexing from Europe and the US, and explored the potential of integrating automated indexing with human annotation of replayable meeting records.

Times Higher Educational Supplement, 20 October 2006

Memetic featured in the article "Rehearsals of a creative connection", pp10-11

JISC inform publication, issue 16, January 2007

"Making the Virtual Real": http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/pub_inform16.aspx

European Conference on Computer Supported Work

Paper on usability issues highlighted by Memetic –submission in progress

Journal of Pragmatics Paper on participation in Access Grid meetings – submission in progress

Conclusions We have found that software to record, replay, and especially that allows rich annotation of recordings by a variety of methods, has the potential to add value to many Access Grid scenarios, particularly meetings, academic seminars, focus groups, ethnography and the evaluation of performance art. Some users have been enthusiastic, particularly those who used the software in latter stages of the project when the software was more stable, robust and fully-featured. We have identified organisational and technological barriers to the use of innovative software such as Memetic and have postulated a number of strategies that may result in more effective user engagement in future work, namely enfranchisement, hypothecation, and synergy.

Implications and Sustainability Memetic allows a different approach to the creation of meeting records, replacing traditional linear minute-taking where the record of a meeting is typically not available for some time after the meeting and is only one person's view of that meeting, to a record that is rich, multimedia, annotated, and agreed by all participants. There are potential ethical and legal implications to this usage mode that would benefit from further investigation. There are also a number of possible development directions for future work, such as the establishment of more rigorous privacy features, automatic annotation by who is speaking and the ability for participants to 'sign' meeting records so that they become agreed contractual documents.

Much of the implementation of the booking system involves the use of people-centric data, such as their identity and affiliation to organisations both real and virtual. Requiring the user to enter this data is a barrier to adoption, as well as an ongoing maintenance burden. Authentication is also an issue and Memetic would benefit from integration with existing identity and authentication systems such as Athens or Shibboleth.


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Memetic enables immediate access to recorded seminars, automatically annotated by seminar slide. The implications of this could be to allow more accessible and annotated records of seminars, workshops and conferences, for both participants and other researchers, which would make available the normally ephemeral interactions that take place in these types of events. There are several development avenues for this type of use; the most important is perhaps that the software would benefit from further development to allow recordings to be viewed in common media formats, making them viewable from players such as Windows Media Player or Real Player.

We have found during the project that Memetic has the potential to be an extremely flexible tool and we believe that the more it receives future use, the more usage modes it will be found to support. One interesting avenue of development is as a tool to support ethnographic research. Opportunities for this may be offered within the new National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) project 'e-Infrastructure for the Social Sciences', which seeks to build tools for social scientists (and is being managed by Memetic's project manager, Michael Daw). There are potential synergies with an NCeSS project at the University of Nottingham that offers annotated multimedia data sets to social scientists, which the project team are also keen to explore.

We are currently awaiting a response to two proposals for the continuation of Memetic development and research, submitted to the JISC VRE programme and the AHRC, which address some of the potential avenues for development above. Memetic would be subject to much greater use and visibility if it were offered as a service to a wide community, especially users already familiar with Access Grid. To this end, the project team are actively pursuing this option through the reprocurement of the Access Grid Support Centre, which is currently in progress.

Recommendations If you are considering trialling Memetic: Our general recommendation if considering trialling Memetic in your work is to think flexibly about which of the tools you wish to use, not be too ambitious at first, and do not hesitate to contact us for advice. In more detail, we flag three points:

• Start simple: Memetic can be used in many ways, as we have sought to emphasise in this report, ranging from lectures, to interactive seminars, to research and management meetings. Memetic can be used simply as a “digital VCR” where you record the session, and then replay some or all of the video from start to end.

• Then get more ambitious: Once you have successfully recorded and replayed a simple session, ScreenStreamer and Compendium can then be introduced as additional media capture and indexing tools. You can have one or several ScreenStreamers running, and you can use Compendium as a simple means of indexing interesting moments to which you want to return, through to creating more complicated structures that reflect your thoughts. If you are interested in improving meetings with Compendium, there are resources on the skill of Dialogue Mapping that you may find useful [www.cognexus.org] and there is a large Compendium user community for information and discussions: www.CompendiumInstitute.org

• Run some trials: While robust, Memetic is a high-end internet videoconferencing tool that may stretch the capacity of your network and computers, so if possible run some trials using the actual equipment you are aiming to use. The national Access Grid Support Centre is here to help you get Access Grid running, and the Memetic project team is here to assist you or your technicians with Memetic-specific queries.

Relation of Compendium to Concept Mapping: Teachers, learners and researchers may be familiar with Concept Mapping as developed by Joseph Novak (http://www.ihmc.us/users/user.php?UserID=jnovak), an approach mapping the structure of a topic or phenomenon which has established itself as an aid for reflective learning and critical thinking in education, research and business. While Compendium is used by many people for Concept Mapping, it differs both technically and notationally in ways that are of interest in education and research. Technically, Compendium uses a full relational database with which other tools can interface, and supports hypertextual 'transclusion' of nodes, such that the same node can appear in multiple maps — contexts — between which the user can navigate quickly. Notationally, Compendium’s focus on


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dialogue and argumentation orients the user to multiple perspectives, in contrast to building a model with a single viewpoint. Compendium is therefore a tool for collaborative inquiry and argumentation, reflecting a constructivist, pragmatic approach to learning that is attracting much interest within the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning community (Andriessen et al, 2003; Kirschner et al, 2003).

E-Learning developments: Teachers, learners and researchers may be interested to learn of a major development that applies the ideas behind Memetic specifically to e-learning. The global movement in Open Educational Resources seeks to tackle inequalities in educational access with quality online materials and e-learning tools. The Open University’s OpenLearn initiative (www.open.ac.uk/openlearn) combines the release of distance-learning materials as Creative Commons licensed web resources, with an open source e-learning environment (Moodle), extended with new tools for learners and educators to collaborate as they study, edit and annotate the materials. OpenLearn demonstrates the relevance and impact of Memetic in two concrete ways:

1. Building on the refinements added during Memetic, Compendium is now integrated into Moodle as a knowledge mapping tool to annotate resources, map the concepts and arguments in learning resources, and sequence resources into learning paths. It was deemed particularly important to support dialogue and argument mapping in order to enable the expression of diverse perspectives on the materials released by the Open University. The Web 2.0 paradigm moves us towards user-provided content and filtering, so the experimental LabSpace area of OpenLearn (labspace.open.ac.uk) makes possible the annotation, re-versioning, discourse and argumentation that was previously detached from the source materials. A Knowledge Map Exchange within the LabSpace will provide further support for the collaborative mapping of websites, concepts and arguments via Compendium and a new Web interface.

2. While the Access Grid is free, it is undeniably a high-end internet videoconferencing tool which typically requires technical support from users’ institutions, even when used only via the desktop of a personal computer (not via a custom Access Grid node room wired for audio and video). With ease of use via poor networks being an important consideration when serving Open University students, in parallel to the Memetic project the Open University has been developing FlashMeeting (www.flashmeeting.com) a simple Web-based videoconferencing tool, freely available (but not open source), built on Adobe Flash technology. This requires end-users to have only a Web browser with the free Adobe Flash plug-in, to hold basic videoconferences in which one person can speak at a time (in contrast to the Access Grid’s full duplex audio). FlashMeeting also provides a record and replay facility, which generates interactive speaker timelines similar to those used in CoAKTinG, and carried through to Memetic.

Teachers, learners and researchers who are excited by the concepts underpinning Memetic as a VRE or VLE, but who may be lacking the technical infrastructure or support to run the tools, may wish to explore these as alternatives providing similar, and complementary, functionality.

References Memetic project outputs (software, user materials and reports): http://www.memetic-vre.net/

Memetic publications: http://www.memetic-vre.net/publications/

CoAKTinG project: http://www.aktors.org/coakting/

Access Grid: http://www.accessgrid.org

Andriessen, J., Baker, M., and Suthers, D. (Eds.). (2003). Arguing to Learn: Confronting cognitions in computer-supported collaborative learning environments. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.


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Kirschner, P.A., Buckingham Shum, S.J. and Carr, C.S. (Eds.) (2003).Visualizing Argumentation: Software Tools for Collaborative and Educational Sense-Making. Springer-Verlag: London. [www.VisualizingArgumentation.info]

Novak, J. D. (1998). Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge: Concept maps as facilitative tools in schools and corporations. Mawah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates


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Appendix A: Memetic in Use

Figure 1 - Memetic booking interface

Figure 2 - Compendium, showing icons for questions, ideas, decisions, pros and nested maps


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Figure 3 - Icons for Compendium stencil set for research into enquiry-based learning

Figure 4 - Automated slide annotation


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Figure 5 - Memetic in replay mode showing navigation options

Figure 6 - Locating Grid workshop using Memetic


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Figure 7 – End user workshop