Attention Metadata Visualizations: Plotting Attendance and Reuse Eleftheria Tomadaki Peter J. Scott Kevin A. Quick Knowledge Media Institute Knowledge Media Institute Knowledge Media Institute The Open University The Open University The Open University Milton Keynes, UK Milton Keynes, UK Milton Keynes, UK +44 1908 653169 +44 1908 655763 +44 1908 654916 E.Tomadaki@open.ac.uk Peter.Scott@open.ac.uk K.A.Quick@open.ac.uk ABSTRACT the context, and used to rank and recommend resources and Contextualized attention metadata can be used to visualize the learning objects [4]. attendance in online events and communities, as well as to Aspects of the users’ context may include their geo-locations or indicate an online object’s reuse. In this paper, we describe work activities and community contributions. In collaborative in progress showing that attention metadata generated by desktop scenarios, Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAM) can be used videoconferencing systems, such as FlashMeeting, can be used to to map social proxies and collective activity. Visualizing social plot community activity and to give some insights into a learning presence can stimulate group awareness and the building of object’s impact on a private community or worldwide. We report collective knowledge in online communities. Presence has on results from a quantitative analysis using attention metadata evolved from just being ‘online’ or ‘offline’ to a range of visualizations in different datasets to demonstrate the preferences such as availability, location, activity awareness and FlashMeeting live and replay impact on specific communities or others [1], [2]. Geo-location maps are currently combined with a globally. Community participation is represented through live range of communication tools, such as instant messengers or event attendance mapping, and learning object reuse through activity awareness applications. Collective awareness can be visualizing replay consumption. Future work directions focus on enhanced with tools, such as TwitterVision or Google maps, providing additional evidence regarding the extent to which representing the individuals’ presence with icons on maps. plotting unique IPs on a geo-location map can be considered as an Mapping individual attendance in collective events organized by accurate method of measuring a learning object’s impact. communities of practice having a common knowledge objective is useful to visualize their evolution. Categories and Subject Descriptors Visualizing attention metadata produced in online collaboration scenarios can be used on the one hand to map community activity C.4 [Computer Systems Organization]: Performance of Systems and attendance and on the other to measure an online object’s - measurement techniques; [Information Storage and Retrieval] consumption. This paper presents work in progress on the H.3.7 Digital Libraries - user issues; [Information Systems attention metadata produced by videoconferencing interactions, Applications]: H.4.3 Communications Applications – showing what people are consuming when using online videoconferencing; [Computers and Society]: K.4.3 communication systems. We give some insights into how Organizational Impacts - computer-supported collaborative work attention metadata visualizations can help represent community participation and activity and investigate whether attention General Terms metadata on IP logs can indicate the impact of learning objects in Measurement, Performance virtual communities worldwide. Keywords 2. FLASHMEETING METADATA FlashMeeting, contextualized attention metadata, metadata visualization, map, learning object, reuse, virtual communities Initially developed to produce a useful in-house communication tool, FlashMeeting appears to currently have a global impact, used by over 33 European projects and numerous other 1. INTRODUCTION communities of learners, educational practitioners and other Attention metadata refers to any content that a user pays attention professionals, counting over 4,000 naturalistic virtual meetings on to and consumes, from websites, wikis, blogs, text chats, emails its servers. FlashMeeting is a light-weight application, running on etc. [3]. Attention metadata has been used to measure the impact a web browser, as long as the Adobe Flash player plug-in of different online objects, such as in Amazon, or citations, such (Version 7 and above) is installed as CiteSeer, or popularity tags found in del.icio.us, where the (http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk/). The meeting booker submits a number of users having bookmarked a page may be a valid form and the system generates a URL, which can be forwarded to measure for its overall significance. This metadata can be other participants and clicked to access the meeting. The system contextualized, taking into consideration the user, the content and favours simplex audio, allowing only one person to broadcast at any one time, suitable for meetings with multiple participants. In 3. PLOTTING ATTENDANCE AND REUSE order to broadcast, one has to push-to-talk, while attendees wishing to speak, raise a symbolic hand and queue until the In order to represent the FlashMeeting global impact on current speaker stops broadcasting, or click on the ‘interrupt’ knowledge transfer communities, we indicate individual button. Other communication channels include text chat, voting, attendance by using attention metadata indicating user browser displaying mood indicators, URL firing and a whiteboard facility hits and plotting the geographical location of unique IPs on maps for uploaded slides and real-time annotations. One of the principal showing the participation in live events and the event replay features of FlashMeeting is the ability to record meetings. These reuse. recordings form effectively a complete record of the event including the browsing of individual broadcasts by time code and 3.1 Live Event Attendance participant name, text chat, voting, fired URLs, whiteboards etc. Attention metadata produced by live logs can indicate the Anything that captures the user’s attention and performance, individual attendance in one meeting, or show the attendance of during all videoconferencing interactions, from booking the individuals in a virtual community holding a set of meetings. meeting, to displaying an emoticon, is logged on the servers. The FlashMeeting CAM is also used to show pairs of individuals co- FlashMeeting client communicates via PHP scripts on the server attending events, and generate contact lists. The extensive logging to log all the data to MySQL database tables. The logged attention employed in FlashMeeting allows metadata based on a user’s IP and performance metadata is then available for dynamic access address to be collected and used to plot on a world map the and manipulation after the meeting. This metadata includes the location of people who have attended meetings. IP addresses are booking logs, the unique IP logs of meeting attendees, the email registered to physical postal addresses, and these can therefore be addresses of signed-in users, the replay hits and the IP addresses plotted to a map. For the majority of cases the registration address of the replay viewers, the booking keywords, annotations, the of an IP very closely matches that of the individual to which it has participant names, the number and duration of broadcasts, the chat been issued (particularly within organizations and companies), logs, the emoticons and URLs fired, interruptions, raised hands, however, occasionally there can be discrepancies, which can lead and the voting and whiteboard logs. Such metadata produced in to an individual’s location being incorrectly located. Additionally, collaborative environments can be merged with additional as IP addresses are continually being registered, the database used attention metadata, e.g. from blog, in AttentionXML streams to to resolve IPs to geographical locations continually has to be feed personalization or recommender systems [3]. The IP logs can updated (the database we have used is provided by Maxmind be used in a variety of ways to visualize for example live meeting LLC, http://www.maxmind.com), and at the point of plotting a attendance and replay reuse. A meetings’ minutes’ page shows map it is possible that a few IPs may not yet exist in the database representations of much of the metadata generated by a meeting and so their locations will not be plotted. and its subsequent reuse. The data has also been used by different systems for different applications, such as generating visualizations of the event shape to show user roles or event type. Other applications include linearly mapping the knowledge communicated in a virtual event or keyword search of replays (http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/amg/SamgiFM/SamgiFM.html). Figure 2. The global impact of the live FlashMeeting system in April 2007 Figure 2 above is a plot of the attendees to meetings held in April 2007 on the research FlashMeeting server at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University, UK. It shows the location of the 900 unique IP addresses accessing meetings (7 IPs were not plotted because they were not in the IP database). People connecting to live meetings during this period are located throughout the world, most of them situated in Europe and North Figure 1. An example of integration of an XML FlashMeeting America. file with the Compendium knowledge mapping tool Looking at the number of attendees of meetings against time (see Figure 1 presents the integration of the XML file generated by the figure 3), it can be observed that there is an upward trend in FlashMeeting server for a public event replay with the attendance in a 21-month period, starting with 300 attendees in Compendium system (http://www.compendiuminstitute.org/) for August 2005, with peaks of around 900 unique IPs in March 2006 knowledge mapping, representing linearly the URLs exchanged in and more recently in April 2007. It seems that there is an that meeting, linking them with the corresponding time-stamped established global community of an average of 600 users holding video segment. FlashMeeting events during a two-year period. Figure 3. FlashMeeting attendance from August 05 to April 07 Figure 5. Replay reuse from August 05 to April 07 3.2 Replay Impact It is clear that the reuse of FlashMeeting recordings has increased The FlashMeeting recording facility reminds the live meeting significantly since 2005, with a peak in January 2007 reaching attendees and informs community members that were unable to over 23,000 hits (see Fig. 5). This is being enhanced due to the attend the meeting of what happened during the event, providing public syndication of replays by users, released in March 2006, an auditable record of actions taken. It can also act as a reusable making replays publicly accessible to people who may never have learning resource, either for a private community, or by making participated in a live FlashMeeting. the resource available to the public. 3.3 Visualizing Community Activity The time-stamped logging of the IP addresses of people accessing all replays allows these 'hits' to be plotted on a world map. Figure The attention metadata produced by live logs can be used to map 4 shows such a plot for April 2007 on the research Flashmeeting the participation of individuals in a community and to portray a server at the Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, general view of the community activity. All logs of unique IPs of UK. The map shows a plot of the 15,995 hits from 4,509 unique people who attended the meeting are recorded on the live user IPs who reused the replays, showing the truly global use attendance map of the event. Although these individuals may play being made of FlashMeeting recordings (see figure 4). different roles in the community, being more or less active than others, it is important to acknowledge their participation in the event, by clicking on the web page and accessing the meeting. The FlashMeeting server hosts a series of public events, such as seminars on Learning Objects, Metadata and Interoperability (LOMI), starting in May 2005, seminars on Knowledge Mapping, starting in December 2006 and others, with experts in various research areas, discussing current topics of interest. Different communities hold their meetings via FlashMeeting, ranging from ‘video-bloggers’ and ‘animation’ students participating in peer-to- peer events, to e-learning communities holding project meetings, interviews and seminars. Figure 4. Replay reuse in April 2007 Since March 2006, users have been encouraged to syndicate some 25 20 of their meetings and share their experiences and events with the 15 world. Several users syndicated some of their past events and IPs 10 continue to share their future ones. Public replays appear in a 5 folksonomy of keywords added by the meeting bookers, which 0 includes at the moment a variety of nearly 200 events: interviews, -N 05 7 -J 5 -N 05 -F 05 -M 06 -S -06 -O 6 -A 7 -A 05 -D 6 -F 7 -J 6 -J 05 -M 06 -J 06 -M 06 -0 19 b-0 05 -0 02 p-0 12 t-0 11 c-0 08 n-0 21 ug- seminars, virtual lectures, web-casts of presentations, workshops 29 eb- 30 ul- 25 ov- 22 v- 07 y- 08 ay- 26 y- 30 a r - pr un un c o a a e e a -M 22 or lectures, moderated project meetings, peer-to-peer support 03 events in learning or counseling contexts and others [5]. Some types of syndicated replays, such as virtual seminars including Figure 6. The attendance of LOMI seminars from May 2005 experts from different parts of the world discussing a current to March 2007 research issue, appear to be rich sources of learning, being reused IP logs can be used to show the attendance in a series of events. In hundreds of times. As opposed to private replays, public replays figure 6, we present the event attendance using the example of 34 are not only viewed by the live meeting attendees, but also by LOMI seminars from May 2005 to present, each one including other people around the world, who may have never used the live from 1 to 22 participants and a mean average of 9 participants per system, but can learn from the replays, thanks to the value of meeting. It seems that a stable community of around 10 syndication (http://flashmeeting.com/public). individuals regularly attend LOMI events, while 22 attendees is the highest attendance number noted in these seminars. In approximately 8 months, the ‘video-blogging’ community replays, as there were 3 live meeting participants in North members have drawn their attention to 36 videoconferencing America but 2,437 resolved IP addresses of replay ‘re-users’ events from September 2006 to May 2007. The event frequency spread all over the world, with many of them located in Europe in such a short period of time shows the engagement of a very and North America (see figure 8). The replay map produced is active community, holding social events that tend to happen impressive, showing more than 2,000 of people located in parts of during weekdays, as well as on weekends. In Figure 7, we have the world different from the location of the live meeting plotted the date of the event and the number of unique IPs, attendees, who have consequently learned from the recording. showing a stable community attending events in a two-year period, while the number of attendees per meeting may range 4. DISCUSSION AND FUTURE WORK from 3 to 21. Can attention metadata based on IP logs be a reliable measure of the impact of an online resource? In the different datasets 25 discussed here, there was a number of IPs not resolved, for 20 15 example 46 IPs were not resolved in the 4,509 user sample of the IPs 10 April 2007 replay viewers. In addition, some IPs may have been 5 erroneously plotted. The accuracy of IP resolution is an issue, but 0 works quite well for the majority of user locations with a few 7 exceptions. Another issue affecting the objectivity of counting on 07 7 7 07 07 7 7 07 7 28 -07 10 -07 6 -0 0 -0 -0 a0 browser hits may be the demonstration of example replays by -0 -0 - - n- - - ay ar ar ar eb eb eb ep pr pr pr M a -M -M -M -M -A -A -A 26 -F -F -F -J -S certain groups. For example, the highest number of hits in one 24 03 14 28 10 21 31 11 21 01 Figure 7. The attendance of ‘videoblogging’ events from LOMI seminar (1,170) with experts discussing ‘open content’ September 2006 to present may have been boosted by its inclusion in an online article linked by a prestigious website. There may be occasions when one replay is viewed thousands of times, due to its featuring as an 3.4 Visualizing Learning Object’s Reuse example in demos and linked from several other web sources. The public replay hits can show the reuse of the meeting by the It would be useful to locate in the future how the users arrived at a people who attended the event and by other people who may have certain replay. Popular replays may have been linked in forums or not attended the specific event or any live FlashMeeting. Several blogs, or just contain keywords attracting the reader’s attention, or FlashMeeting replays can be considered as learning objects. For including popular keywords, searched by users in search engines example, the series of LOMI seminars can be reused to learn and pointed to their FlashMeeting replay. Knowing how the users about learning objects and metadata, while there are other series arrived at the replay URL will give more insights into the reason of events, seminars, lectures or presentations, with a goal to of attention to the specific event replay, e.g. it was linked in a transfer knowledge. The FlashMeeting folksonomy of public forum, or in another website where the community of interest meetings is based on the metadata produced by keywords added drew their attention to, or syndicated and appearing in the when booking or editing the meeting. It is possible to give FlashMeeting folksonomy with an interesting keyword choice, or insights into a learning object’s impact, by taking into advertised in online news stories or shown in demos. This will consideration the hits and unique IPs of users who paid attention lead to contextualized recommendations of attention resources. to its resources. The most popular replays relate to a series of presentations called 5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ‘Historic Homeworks’ showing a range of house renovation This research is supported by the EU 6th Framework Network of activities from window repairs to floor planing. From March 2006 Excellence in Professional Learning – Prolearn. We acknowledge until May 2007 there had been 36 of these events. The replays of the contribution of Jon Linney to the FlashMeeting system design. 7 of these presentations had been each viewed more than 3,500 times and the replay of one of the presentations from October 2006 included the highest number of viewings, counting 6,012 6. REFERENCES hits from 2,437 unique IPs. [1] Lee, K.M. Presence Explicated. Communication Theory, 14:1, (Feb. 1993), 27-50. [2] Lombard M. and Ditton, T. At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 3, 2, (Sep. 1997). [3] Najjar, J., Wolpers, M. and Duval, E. Attention Metadata: Collection and Management. WWW06 workshop on Logging Traces of Web Activity, (Edinburgh, 2006). [4] Ochoa, X. and Duval, E. Use of Contextualized Attention Figure 8. The live attendance and replay maps of the most Metadata for Ranking and Recommending Learning Objects. popular recording on the FlashMeeting server, counting 6,015 ACM SIGIR Conference CAMA workshop, (Virginia, 2006). hits [5] Scott, P.J, Tomadaki, E. and Quick, K.A. The Shape of Live The comparison of the live attendance and replay maps shows Online Meetings. 3rd International Conference on that users outside of the presenter’s community have accessed the Technology, Knowledge and Society, (Cambridge, 2007).