 Many thanks, Lucien Antoine, for setting the stage for this afternoon's lecture. I'm very thankful to all of you for being here with me today and thank you to my family, my friends and my colleagues who are viewing this lecture online. Well, I have been a student of the university and I've been an A.L. and as well as a full-time staff member here. And I've enjoyed each of the roles immensely, but the role that I have enjoyed the most is being a student of the Open University. It has been an enriching experience and I'm grateful for the support I have received while being here at the university. Coming on to this afternoon's lecture, I think that I'm presenting on your behalf. I am here because of all of you, the support I have received over the years from my colleagues, from external collaborators, from local schools, local voluntary organisations that have helped me to put this research programme together. So here it is on your behalf that I'm presenting. My research has involved how to design online technologies to meet users' requirements. And this focus on users means that I have been studying users' behaviour with online technologies over the last few years. And my research has spanned over several emerging online domains. So we started with e-commerce, we started looking into e-travel, we looked at e-shopping, we looked at e-government, e-health. And each time we were looking at aspects of cross-cultural usability, we were looking at aspects of privacy, we were looking at how these sites can engender trust among their users. Then we started looking into online communities. And in fact one of my students here in the audience is looking at online dating sites. But we've looked into online communities such as hyper-local communities, parenting communities. And what are the factors that build and sustain these communities? But also how do they help the users who go on to these communities? Then we've looked at social media, that is what is the role of social media in learning, teaching and research. And one of my students who's here in the audience today has looked into the role of social media in disaster management. Then we've looked at virtual worlds and virtual reality and I'll have some instances of that in the lecture this afternoon. But we've also extended this research into looking at how these online technologies can support older people, especially how they can support their physical and mental well-being. And although accessibility has been an ongoing theme in our projects, we are now looking at how massive open-line courses, which is MOOCs, can be designed for accessibility and how they can support especially age-related impairments. So as you will see, our work has spanned over several domains and starting from schools to further education, to higher education and to distance education. And our participant user base has spanned right from school students to older people and users. But today I'll focus on these three technologies, the social software, which is technologies such as blogs, wikis, microblogging tools such as Twitter. And then I look into activity trackers. So these are devices such as smartwatches and other activity trackers. And here we'll specifically look at how these technologies can support the physical and mental well-being of older people, carers and the people that are being cared for. And then I look into virtual reality and 3D virtual worlds. In all these three technologies, there are two underlying themes. First of all, these technologies enable social connections and they influence directly our physical, mental and our psychological well-being. And the other thing that we will look at is how these technologies support learning and how they support knowledge construction collectively and individually. So we will run through these two themes as we go through our lecture today. And I may not be able to present all the research methodologies or the underlying theoretical underpinnings of our research. But all our papers, reports, handbooks are in the Open University's research repository called AURO or Open Research Online. So let me first start with social software. And one of the technologies in social software that we investigated was wikis. So we set up wikis in a software engineering module called Software Requirements for Business Systems. And the objective of this module was that, given a business problem, you are developing a software system. And how would you collect a consistent set of requirements for it? How would you document those requirements? So that was the module's objective. And in requirements engineering practice and software engineering practice, sell them to teams work in one location. They work across globally distributed environments. And we wanted to emulate that requirements engineering practice in our modules. And that is why we introduced the wiki so that students could do small group collaborative activities in this wiki. So I'll take an example of a dental practice. For example, you're setting a website of a dental practice. So who are the stakeholders? They are the patients, the dentists, the dental nurse and the receptionist. And therefore the students would be collecting the requirements from the perspective of these different stakeholders, putting them into the wiki, identifying any duplicates or identifying any kind of inconsistencies and coming up with a consistent set of requirements. And in the first two evaluations of the module, we found that the students said that we would like another tool running alongside the wiki so that we could document our justification. So when we are working collaboratively, we need to let others know why we are taking certain decisions. So we introduced a forum that ran alongside a wiki. Then they said we don't know one another well enough to be able to critique the work. So we introduced an initial socialisation activity. But then for group work, you also need some social etiquettes and norms. And that is what we did. We introduced some norms for working in group activities. But we also allocated some roles to them, like a chairperson, a progress chaser, a secretary and a planner, so that they could allocate these roles amongst themselves and conduct the activities so that it could be completed in time before the Tudor Marked Assignment or the TMA. Next, I'll take an example of the blog. In blogs we have conducted research on how academics find blogs useful for their public engagement and impact, how researchers find it useful for their purposes. And we also looked at the roles of blogs in open university modules. And today what I'll do is take an example of a module in which blogs were introduced. It was a module called H808, which is the e-learning professional module. And the audience of that module was teachers. And they were doing this e-learning professional course and they were expected to blog regularly. And they were reflecting on their learning in this blog, but they were also reflecting on their teaching practice. That as they become e-learning professionals, how would their teaching practices change? So they were supposed to reflect in the blog. And as the code shows that the students did find this reflection very useful, they said that if we were writing in a Word document, we wouldn't have found it as effective as collaborating in a blog and getting that peer-to-peer feedback. But we investigated more on the effectiveness of this blog. And we found that there were three factors that were important for educators who were designing these blogging activities and for students to conduct these activities. So first of all, setting the expectations. So if there are other tools in the module like wikis, portfolios, then how would you, how does the blog sit alongside these tools? They also wanted to know what are the skills they are getting by this blogging activity. And they also wanted to find out what the technical capabilities of this tool are so that they could exploit the full potential of the tool for their purposes. And there were four other factors in the framework that we developed. One was the audience. So who is the audience of my blog? Do I need comments on my blog? And what will I do with these comments if I get? Who will be my community? And do I want to build a community around my blog? And finally, it was the presentation. How I should present myself as a blogger in this blog? And how I should be presenting the content in the blog? Should be an informal presentation or a formal presentation? Then we moved on to look at social software for research dialogues and we did a project in which we investigated how PhD students, early career researchers and supervisors were using social software tools. And as you know, with any project that we do these days, we have globally distributed teams. So in one of the projects that we are involved with, our collaborators are based in the UK as well as in the US. And you've got to choose a set of tools that works for the entire team. And therefore we use Google Docs for documenting our meeting notes. We use Google Hangouts and Skype for video conference. We use MenLift as a bibliographic reference management system. And we use, as I said, Skype for video conferencing. And these tools then enable us to collaborate and communicate with one another. And it was the same in our research project we discovered that people were using a variety of tools. And the tools were in six key categories. They were in formal dialogues with supervisors, informal dialogues with peers, document management, space for reflection, engaging with the community and keeping themselves informed. For example, TED Talks, keeping themselves informed through Twitter. But there was a huge variety in the usage of the tools and it was dependent on their own digital skills, the subject of the discipline that they were conducting research in and the skills of the supervisors. What were their perceptions about the social media? So based on this research, we developed some typical personas of supervisors and researchers using these tools so as to guide other researchers of how, with different perceptions towards social media, how you could bring a tool set together for your purposes. But one advantage came out very clearly in all these evaluations. And that was, they said, that the portability of the tools is important for us. So if we moved to another institution, we can take these tools with us. We can take our materials with us because they are all in the social media domain rather than being bound by the institution prescribed tools. And our handbook, which is one of the most downloaded resources from the open research online or AURO, has information about how to develop a social media strategy. It has information on digital professionalism. How do you use social media ethically when you are conducting research? And how do you develop the social etiquette and norms for conducting research dialogues in social media? And what we've also done is we've mapped the VTI's researcher development framework to the tools in the social media domain so that the students can map these tools onto the skills that they want to develop. And this slide shows the different kinds of personas which are detailed in our handbook. But then we moved on to investigating, as Anne was saying, on how these social media tools could help older people. So how they could help in elevating their social isolation and loneliness. And this is a case study of a lady who's 90 years old. She was given an iPad on her 90th birthday. And when I spoke to her and conducted a conversation with her over Skype, she said that I always felt like a sponge because I was always very keen on learning. And now I've become even a bigger sponge because of having all that information over the web. She was interested in meditation. She started watching YouTube videos on meditation. She was emailing. She uses it for looking at photographs of her family. And she feels very connected throughout the day being in the care home all on her own. And she's also now training other people on the care home to use this tablet. So our research indicated that there are two key things that came up here. That if you want older people to get online, there has to be an interest or a motivation. It could be an interest in family history. It could be an interest in photography. Or it could be an interest in brass bands so that they have a reason to get online. And then they need a personal face-to-face support. It could be a network of people that support them, how to choose the right kind of technology when they start deciding on a technology. Then how do they keep using it? How do they sustain their use? So they don't need a human or a personal person contact to help them through it. And now I wanted to share with you this very interesting website called Blip Photo. I think that this is one of the most creative and engaging communities on the web. The principle is very simple. You only are allowed to share one photograph a day, and the average age of the users on this site is over 55. And you have to write a short narrative around this photograph, which could be something around the photograph or it could be something about your day. And our research again with older people on this site has indicated that having this principle of doing one photograph a day gives them that discipline of going out, doing something, getting a picture, keeps them motivated, keeps them engaged, and helps towards their isolation. And in fact one of the participants she shared with us, she said, being on this site, I'm not only developing photography skills, but I'm also recording my own life because she's recording whatever she's doing on a daily basis. And it is this recording of life every day and sharing your life every day through one photograph helps to create those online connections and online friendships. And these people who are using this, who use this site, they fondly call themselves as blippers. And they have these offline connections as well because many of these friendships, when they grow online, they get into offline meetings and they call these offline meetings as blip meets. So it's a fascinating site and it continues to grow and flourish and specifically for older people, it has been extremely useful site. Let me now take you to the second part of our inaugural lecture today and which is activity trackers. So activity trackers are devices such as these, like a smartwatch I'm wearing, and these devices record the steps you've taken, the calories you've expended in a day, your heart rate, and they also record your sleep patterns. And why we started conducting research in this area was because there were three key reasons here. First of all, our research in social isolation and loneliness with older people we discovered that the more people were physically active, the less socially isolated they felt. So if people went along in their local community out and about, if they were volunteering, they felt less socially isolated. Also there is a direct link between physical activity and cognitive and mental health. And finally we felt that with the digital NHS, more and more of us would be expected to be using these kinds of devices for self-monitoring and self-management of our health. So we thought if we take these off the shelf devices that are currently available, these kinds of activity trackers, and we conduct research with older people and find out the challenges they experience in using these devices, and what are the advantages they experience, what are the ethical considerations or concerns of sharing the data from these devices. Then having had that kind of an experience and information that we would gather as a part of our research, we would then be able to derive implications for designing such kind of digital health variables for specific medical conditions. So these were the objectives why we went on to conduct this research in digital health variables. And as this picture shows that along with the digital health variable there is on the tablet or on the phone, you have a kind of a dashboard through which you can connect with people and you can follow their activity as they use a similar device. And it can also be used for remote caring and remote monitoring. So as with all our other projects that we've conducted with older people, in this project also we have been working with Age UK Milton Keynes and with Carers Milton Keynes. And we gave out 22 activity trackers in the community to people aged over 55 to see whether these devices bring about any behaviour change in them. And through workshops and I.D studies and as they came to us at the university here, we found that yes there was an increased awareness of their physical activity. They became more aware of their food intake and how well or not they should be using the car at times. And especially the older people in our participant group that is near about 80s, they became much more aware of how they should pace their activity and how they should have regular breaks as they go along. Otherwise they used to feel very tired on a particular day because of too much of physical activity. So this pacing became useful for them. And when we spoke to carers they said that these devices would be very useful for them for monitoring their own health and especially their sleep patterns because of the pressures that they work under. And for the people that are being cared for these devices can be very useful for monitoring their health in terms of their activity, having reminders for medication, reminders for movement and so on. So both the carers and the people being cared for found usefulness with these devices. And they also said that they would be able to monitor one another through the dashboard I had shown you that when a person, when the carer is out or when the person being cared is out they could monitor themselves. So this is one of our participants in the workshop and he came and he said he discussed about the difficulties of data interpretation from that dashboard that I showed you earlier. And this is just one example of how our participants in our research projects work as co-researchers. So we don't give a formal invitation out whenever we start with a research program that please become our co-researchers. But what we do is early on in the project when we recruit a participant group we shared the vision of the project with them. We said this is what we want to achieve this is what we hope to have at the end of the project what are the expected outcomes and this is what we feel will be the practical implications of this particular project, how it would benefit the community. And over a few meetings we find that our participants become co-researchers. They start sharing the data with us they start sharing their experiences with us and they become advocates of our research and they also give a voice to the people or the user group that we are conducting research on. And we find this extremely useful because there is a constant dialogue and feedback that we get from our participants. And they give us insights into our research that we would normally miss because they are out and about in the community and they bring inputs to us as co-researchers. Let me now take you to the third part which is the virtual reality and 3D virtual worlds. I think some of you might have seen my colleague Anna showing the Google Expeditions or the simplest form of virtual reality I would say which works as an app on a smartphone and you have this kind of a virtual reality viewer this is called Google Cardboard and you insert your phone in it and these kinds of lenses here they provide the virtual reality view. And this is the simplest form where you have 360 degree photospheres but then you have multi-user and three-dimensional virtual worlds. And at the other end of the spectrum you have these very high-spec computers learning virtual reality games with very high-spec virtual reality headsets as well. So let me first start with the simplest one that some of you might have seen outside which is the Google Expeditions. So they are, as I said, 360 degree photospheres and they are about 600 expeditions. So there are 600 places that you can visit in this mobile app. So on the left-hand side you will find that that is the grid barrier reef. So you can visit places that you may not be able to visit in real life. And on this side you have the simulations because there are several simulations in this Google Expeditions app of the nervous system, circulatory system, digestive system, the solar system. So concepts which are difficult for students to visualize and understand. And we've been conducting research on how Google Expeditions can support geography and science education in schools. And our research has shown that these kinds of visualizations and the 360 degree view that you can see all over gives you that three-dimensional view and it helps to support learning in terms of concretizing the learning, making complex processes, systems and events easier to comprehend and to understand. And our research in inquiry-based learning, that is in geographical inquiry and scientific inquiry, we've seen that the questions that the students generate as a part of the inquiry, they are of much higher order than you would get by using traditional resources like a PowerPoint or a picture or even a video. Now let me share with you these two case studies of using Google Expeditions. On the left hand side is local to global and through these two case studies I'll show you how you can situate your learning in a classroom by using virtual reality in an international context. So coming to the local to global, this case study is of a science teacher and she was doing a series of lessons on rocks and fossils. So she did one set of lessons in the school and she has a beautiful rock box with the number of rocks in it and she gave out the rocks to the students and they studied those rocks, types of rocks, the characteristics of rocks. Then she did a physical field trip to the local symmetry and she took the students out there what the kinds of rocks were, why they were being used in that particular setting and then she used Google Expeditions where she took students to Machu Picchu, to pyramids in Egypt, she took them to Taj Mahal, she took them to Petra in Jordan and suddenly the learning moved from a physical classroom to a physical field trip into an international context. The second case study on the right which is global to local, this is a geography teacher and she took her students to a field trip to a local nature reserve and she wanted to sensitise her students that when large scale infrastructural changes happen then how does it affect the nature reserve or how does it affect the environment and she took the example of environmental change in Borneo and she showed them the expedition while the students were in that nature reserve on how the tropical forests in Borneo have been affected because of the deforestation for palm plantations and how they have been affected because of building of hotels and luxury resorts. So the students through looking at the environmental change in Borneo they had the opportunity to reflect on how their local environment, the local nature reserve would change as a result of the HS2, the railway HS2 passing very close to the local nature reserve. So this is how you can move the learning from a national context to an international context by using virtual reality. And as I said, virtual reality comes in different forms and this is another form. It is much more complex than what we've seen in terms of photo spheres. So on the left you have realistic spaces. This is a Stonehenge replication of a 3D environment with avatars and then you have these kinds of platforms in the sky and in fact this particular picture is from one of our modules called Team Working in Distributed Environments and this is in fact the tutor in his Aul avatar and he came at the end of this team meeting for the debriefing with the students and our students used to meet regularly in this environment to conduct their team meetings in this particular module. And so we conducted research on how you can design what is the relationship between the realism of the space and the activities that you could design in it and we found that the more realistic the space is if it is photorealistic it gives familiarity and comfort to the users. And as we have seen in Google expeditions that the photorealism you can visit places that you won't be able to visit because of the realism that they have. And we also, these realistic spaces give you a sense of ownership and a sense of belongingness. So on our OU's campus in Second Life we even have the five pillars that are outside the library. Just that we have brought some artefacts from our campus into this virtual campus of the university. And then we found that the fantasy spaces such as these which have no concept of gravity they can be useful for creativity and fun and the open spaces are good for setting up design studios and for collaboration and networking. But these avatars they give you a sense of place that is as if you've been there because it's a three dimensional environment and you have your identity as an avatar there and they also give you a sense of presence or a sense of co-presence as if you've met somebody. And this is my student Thania she was doing our doctorate in education program with us and for three years we met in Second Life. We did not meet at all in real life during those three years. I have only met her once when she came to the campus for doing her examination. And during those three years we used to go to different places so if we were doing literature review I would take her to a library. If we were practicing for a conference I would take her to a theatre like this so that she could stand in the podium and practice and I was sitting in the audience and I would bring up some more people around to give her feedback. And she always said to me at the end of the meeting Shelly I feel I have met you because of that avatars and because of the sense of presence that she felt in that environment with me. Having done this work in 3D virtual worlds and having had the experience that what the potential of these environments is we thought let's build a 3D virtual world for ourselves. As you know the outdoor field work is very significant in geography in science and geology and those kinds of subjects and many of our students can't go for physical field work or outdoor field work mainly because of mobility constraints resource constraints and even family constraints. So we thought we would build a virtual geology field trip in this environment and why we chose a virtual geology field trip was because my colleague Tom he goes every year to the skid-daw mountains in the Lake District as a part of the earth sciences module. So we chose the skid-daw mountains and we used digital photogrammetry and 3D modelling to build this skid-daw into the 3D environment using the Unity 3D gaming engine. And so there are six sites which are simulated in this environment and as you see as an avatar you can move around in the environment just as you would do in a physical field work but the advantage of being in a virtual environment is that you can fly and you can get the perspective of the whole area which you may not perhaps get on a physical field work. So you get much more familiarity with the area if you are in this virtual field trip environment. And we thought that this virtual field trip would help both our students. Students who are going for a physical field trip they could use this environment for practising and reflection and students who aren't able to go for a field trip they would experience a near about physical field trip experience. So this environment allows you to prepare for the real world that means that you can practise your skills in this. So here if you see the resolution of the rocks is so good that Tom set up activities in this so that they could do sketching by looking at the rocks and sketching is a very important geological scale. And you can also pick up rocks so this is a rock which is highlighted and you can learn about the rock within the context. Normally if you are on a physical field trip you would pick up a rock and then bring it back to the field centre and analyse it near a microscope or using other grain charts and other instruments. But here you have a grain chart within the environment and this is an authentic rock which has been digitally photographed and brought within this environment. And there is also a link to the virtual microscope here and this is one of our other apps in the open science lab. You can open the virtual microscope and see this rock under the virtual microscope. And because you are in a virtual world you can go beyond what you can do in a real world. So here we have draped an ordinance survey map over the mountains and these give the essential 3D visualisation skills the spatial thinking and spatial literacy skills and mapping skills which are so significant for geologists and geographers. And for geologists that is what their task is they want to know what the earth looks like where they are standing and therefore in this environment you can bring up a slice of the earth and see the rock structures in that environment and Skid-Daw site is particularly interesting and that is why perhaps Tom has chosen it both for the virtual field trip and the physical field trip because the rocks vary right from slate to granite and this is how you pick up a slice of the rock and view it. I have a very short video for about two minutes just to show you how when Avatar moves around this environment so that you can get a real feel of what happens. So let me just start it for you and I hope you can see and I'll talk through things as we go along. So this is, she's on site one and these are the sketch points where she can stand and sketch on the rocks but I'm showing you more about the picking of the rocks so the rock will be highlighted and this is a compass which is very useful in this environment it helps in navigation and wave finding but to use a compass is also very useful because when you are sketching you should know from which direction you are sketching a particular exposure of a rock so now she picks up the rock and she can rotate it in any way she can move it up and down she can magnify it and use it against a grain chart to study its grain structure it's all in a fast-format mode because I didn't want to take your time but yet show you the potential of what this technology can do and now she's gone to the regional context menu of the virtual field trip and this is where she's draping the maps over the mountain so this is the ordinance survey these are the six sites of the skittaw mountains that we've brought into this environment and you have various directions that you can see the north-west, north-east, south-west, south-east and this shows the variety of the rock structures on the geological map and these are the six sites and you can click on it and go to a particular site you can teleport directly to another site unlike a physical field trip where Tom has to take a bus to take people from site one to site six here you can just teleport and this is the bringing of the slice of the earth that how you can do it and it's a multi-user environment because the icons there show you can do messaging in this you can also find out who is online so if your tutor is online you can find out which site he is on and you can go on that site and have a conversation and you can send messages as well now let me at the end of my lecture today try to bring everything together that we've talked about so we've talked about these three technologies social software, activity trackers virtual reality and 3D virtual worlds and what we've seen today is that technology is useful it is powerful, it empowers people it helps people to be informed it helps people to feel connected as so many examples we've seen today how technology can make people feel connected it helps people to achieve their goals it helps people to nurture their interests and it helps to look after our own health but we can also through these technologies care for others but the technology has to be designed to fit with the tasks that the users do and as users become more familiar with the technology and as they adopt the technology then they appropriate the technology for their purposes so let me see, let me show you what does this design constitute of so this design first of all constitutes of how do you design the right kind of spaces and as you saw how we designed the space around the wiki where we added a forum next to it you've also seen the realistic and the non-realistic spaces in 3D virtual worlds or you would have seen the dashboard of that digital variable that is the space I'm talking about how you design that space for establishing that social connection but the space and the activities are related the space has to be designed for the activities that you conduct so how the blip photo has been designed for contributing one photo a day or how the digital health variables have been designed and how the blog is a personal space for reflection and wiki is suitable for collaborative work but for all these technologies to be effective you need to have some social norms and etiquettes whether it was contributing one photo a day on blip photo or whether the roles that we set up and the etiquettes we set up in the wiki example or it is the ethical considerations of sharing the data when you are using digital health variables all those constitute the social norms and structures for this kind of usage of the technology to be effective but first of all you also have to say you have to set the expectations of the user so what this technology is for what it can do for you and that is what we call as the design of the technology and if the design meets the user's requirements then users get real experiences that is those experiences which matter to them which are of personal value to them and from which they can derive personal meanings those are what we call as real experiences and these constitute of broadening the horizons so as we saw in that 90 year old lady how she was learning even at that age from the web and it is social engagement whether it was the dashboard of the digital health variable or it was the blip photosite there was the social engagement happening and finally skills development so we've seen how blogs gave them reflective skills how wiki enabled collaborative working skills how social software helps us in developing our skills for as a researcher and when the design is right and when people get these real experiences that is the time knowledge co-construction happens that is when there is a collective learning because people then understand when they are working together the different perspectives or different understandings that people bring to that dialogues and in those dialogues then users negotiate their own meanings and develop knowledge and this is not only enhancing their current understanding but coming up with something new something they hadn't known before and that knowledge is both individually and collectively constructed if the design is right and if you are able to give them the real experiences that is what I mean by knowledge co-construction so what is the future? I think that there is a need for us to continue to do research in seeing how these technologies can support learning, teaching and our daily lives because these technologies as we have seen have tremendous potential in changing and adapting our lives but I think it should start early it should start in schools where schools adopt more technologies in their learning and teaching and the teachers adopt more technologies in their teaching and learning we have in our research while we have been working with schools we have found that the duration of the field trips is reducing in geography and science we have seen that the frequency of these field trips is reducing if the proper continuing professional development was provided to the teachers to use these technologies they could perhaps use virtual field trips to complement the physical field trips or they could have, when they have the right CPD they would be able to choose a set of tools that matches with their own teaching practices but in every case study that we have seen today you would have seen that there is a role of human that is a person who organizes these activities designs the activities sets up the social etiquettes and norms and designs the spaces and the activities for you to conduct your activities and to develop these social connections and we also saw with the older people and users they also need a human contact to help them when they are using technologies and to sustain the usage of these technologies so I feel that in spite of the progress that we have made in our efforts in data analytics and learning analytics I still feel that there is a vital link between a student and an educator and that is only possible through a human intervention a machine intervention cannot provide me with the motivation and engagement that my tutors gave to me while I was studying with the university here so I think that human intervention is vital and it shouldn't be forgotten in the chain between a student and the learning and the teaching and perhaps this is a good time for me to thank my teachers I have been very fortunate to have some very good teachers right from my school to my university to my PhD and to my open university tutors and many of my colleagues here have been my teachers I have learnt so much while I have been here so many thanks, I am very grateful to you on behalf of myself, my colleagues and my university for your time and attention today, thank you