The Ed Techie

Finding the message in medium

I had a play with medium the other day. It's an interesting bit of software - it installs a sidepanel on your browser and then creates a visual radar of sites similar to the one you are visiting. You can see which other medium users are at these sites. You chat with them by putting out a general call on the bulletin board. I found it a bit disconcerting though, having these people watch the sites you visit. You can make yourself anonymous, but even so the thought of being observed feels rather intrusive, and so I turned it off and it has remained that way since. I also found the means of communicating didn't really lend itself to decent conversation with people posting rather banal comments.

As I said in an earlier post on Gabbly, I think there is something in these tools for e-learning as they can promote informal discussion around content. I think medium would need to work on the group allocation though - I can see it being a good tool for an agreed set of users to collaborate on a specific task, for instance a tutor group could perform online research using it. There is a friends option, so maybe this could perform that function (as usual I didn't have any friends so couldn't experiment) but I think you'd want to allow simple group allocation and lose the general waffle.

The scrobbling of sites you visit to create the web radar is a good idea also, although I don't want others observing what I do (not that I do anything unsavoury, unless one counts going to some Spurs discussion sites).

Is Nielsen a stickability kinda guy?

A few people (including Dawud Miracle) have blogged about Jacob Nielsen (it is law that I have to use the term 'usability guru' here) and his interview with the BBC where he suggested web 2.0 was neglecting good design. Nielsen speaks good sense sometimes (I particularly like his top 10 UI bloopers in Hollywood), but I've always found his design rules rather steadfast, or rather that people taken them and apply them too rigourously. I remember sitting in a meeting with the ill-fated UKeU and someone gave us a lecture on usability, based entirely on Nielsen, which was to form the basis of their VLE design. I pointed out that a VLE was not like a shopping site where users want to get in and out quickly, but was somewhere users spent a lot of time - weeks, months even. They would sacrifice some of the principles of good design over utility - e.g. they'll happily have lots of information on the page if it saves them lots of clicks to get back to the same point.

Anyway, although Nielsen is sort of right, and users tend to add widgets and content to sites with the same respect for design as you'll find for plot in say, a William Burroughs novel, I think he's also missing the point. MySpace sites are truly awful in their design, and yet there is something refreshing in their chaotic assemblage. Not being tied down by design laws has really liberated all those people (okay, all those teenagers) who want to create a site they feel reflects them. A teenager's mind isn't a very orderly place, and the sites reflect that. But this take it and mix it all up in a novel, unpredicatble way is part of the essence of web 2.0, and if design suffers a bit through that, it may be a price worth paying as from the mess genuinely exciting things emerge.

The other point is that Nielsen has been critical of RSS and blogs, and I wonder if he's not still stuck on stickability as it were. As Tim O'Reilly argues the shift from stickiness to syndication is one of the web 2.0 transformations. Nielsen made his name in a stickability world, and in many ways it's in his interest to keep promoting this view as this is where his company make their money. But in a syndication world, I am in charge of the design in my Netvibes, Pageflakes, or whatever site. I want others to provide good content, but I don't need them to provide the design. In rather the same way that the internet unbundled the information about a product from the product itself, so web 2.0 unbundles design and content.

When I missed the Gabbly bus

No. 2 in an occassional series of things I didn't follow up on (see When I missed the wiki bus). A few years ago I suggested that we develop a tool that allowed instant messaging on a specific page, ie it showed you who was reading that page at the same time and you could chat with them. This was intended for study, so students reading the same page in a VLE could say 'I don't get this, do you?'. I even had a natty name for it - 'StudyBuddy'. Of course, nothing ever came of it, but recently I've been looking at Gabbly (possibly as a tool for the FLOSScom summer school), which does exactly this. I think this incidental 'I've bumped in to someone else around a resource' type of dialogue has huge potential for e-learning.

Andreas Meiszner pointed me at me.dium.com (I hate these urls that split up a word, I can never remember them. Delicious has a lot to answer for) which potentially looks even better, although I have twice applied to participate and not heard anything back, so can't verify this yet.

I still think StuddyBuddy is a better name...

OpenLearn conference

Patrick McAndrew (keep blogging Patrick!) sent me a call for papers for an open learn conference here at the OU, which might be of interest to some readers:

The call for papers is open for the openlearn 2007 conference: researching open content in education. Deadline for submission by short papers (~1000words) is 31st May 2007. The conference will be held 30-31 October 2007 near The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. There will be no charge for attendance with priority for registration given to those responding to the call for papers. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education.

The four main themes are:

• Research agenda,
• Sustainability,
• User experience,
• Software and tools

Further information can be found at: http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/openlearn2007

Forms for submission of papers can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/openlearn2007/papers.php and should be emailed to openlearn-conference@open.ac.uk by 31st May 2007.

Value of EdTechie

John pointed me at this Cyberwire site which calculates the monetary value of your site - pointless but irresistible. Mine is worth $5,662. For one moment I thought that was a monthly figure, but it's annual. We always said we didn't do it for money didn't we? (and I bet if I did start plugging this site for adverts as much as they suggest the traffic would wane).

The future is here...

.. we just haven't noticed it.

I had a fairly normal working day today, but I reflected on how technologically infused it was. This posting isn't meant to be smug and purvey how modern my life is, since I'm aware that (strange though it may seem) some people are not working in educational technology, and so the working day of, a plumber say, may not be so affected (but probably more financially rewarding). And also there are people who live a far more technologically enhanced life, but it struck me that we have these small incremental changes and occassionally we have to take stock. Below is my day, and I like to think that had I seen such a diary in 1990 I would have thought it was the restricted to science fiction or at least some kind of techno-eltite:

• 8am. I was working from home, which is in Cardiff, and my workplace is 150 miles away in Milton Keynes, so I start the day with email.
• 8.30 I do a blog post on the wiki tool wetpaint.
• 9.00 I have a conference call with a team at the OU working on Learning Design.
• 10.00 I have a Flashmeeting with partners on the Flosscom project who are based in Milton Keynes, Greece and Germany.
• 11.00 I have a Skype video chat, with 2 colleagues at the OU library where we haven't been able to synchronise diaries for a face to face meeting.
• 12.00 I share a document with some colleagues via Google docs
• 2.00 I start preparing a presentation for a blogging workshop. I find images that other people have created via Flickr and a couple of excellent video clips via YouTube, and look for ideas from Powerpoint presentations shared by strangers on Slideshare.
• 3.30 I update my Facebook profile after being invited to be somebody's friend and not having used Facebook for ages.
• 5.00 I meet my wife and go down the pub (okay, not much technology involved there).

Sometimes you take all this stuff for granted and it's worth stopping every now and then to really appreciate the changes that have taken place. And while all of this has been possible for a few years now, the point is that it all worked (reasonably) seamlessly and the technology was almost transparent - we just used it. When it is this pervasive in your working life you have to say that a revolution of sorts has taken place - you just haven't acknowledged it.

What a difference some design makes

I came across wetpaint today - a service that allows people to easily create wikis. Nothing particularly new there, but here's the catch - they look good! Most wikis are a bit on the bland side, but without any specialist programming skills anyone can create an attractive wiki here. It seems to have caught on too with lots of hobby and interest sites flourishing, although a lot of them seem to be just using it to create websites that don't really do much by the way of wiki.

I am currently considering where we house the FLOSScom summer school (which will be about learning in an open source community), and wikiversity seems the logical choice, but the interface of wetpaint is nicer and may encourage more participation.

Flickrvision and glanceability

I spent rather too long gazing at Flickrvision today (via Alan Cann). In a kind of web 2.0 orgy, I had some americana music playing through LastFM also which made it an audio/visual experience (of course I should have been twittering about it to really be 2.0, but I'll blog instead). Tony Hirst recently blogged about the concept of glanceability which we picked up from James Cridland. This strikes me as a good example, although I didn't so much glance as lose myself (perhaps we need another term such as procrastinatability or gazeability). I could dip in and out as I worked but it was more than just radio, and different from TV.

I have been having some thoughts about future collaboration with the BBC and one might be to generate glanceability content that is associated with a radio programme, so it can scroll across a digital TV or a web player. This might be OU material, or student generated material from OU students. Either way I think it is possible to have decent synergy between a programme that is of interest to students and content that is of interest to general listeners. I wasn't so keen on Twittervision as an entertainment or diversion, although I can see it may have good educational uses again if it was linked to a programme or event.

A critical mass of tagged, subscribable content

I haven't looked at Pageflakes for a while and went there the other day. I registered as a new user, and it impressed me with the default content it provided. It picked up I was in Cardiff from my IP address and provided me with a decent set of Cardiff related content, including:

• Cardiff news stories
• Cardiff photos
• A google map with Cardiff events marked on it
• Cardiff weather

Several things struck me about this, apart from thinking 'that's cool!' (as an aside can a 40 year old actually use the term 'cool' in any context without embarrassment?). The first was that considering it only had one bit of info to go on, that's not bad personalisation. Imagine what a learning system could do that had course history, user preferences, learning styles (if such things really existed), scores, etc to go on?

Second, this level of purely automatic content selection (I don't suppose there was a little man selecting content for me at the Pageflakes garage) has only really been realisable recently as we have reached a critical mass of content that is tagged (the photos were from Flickr and just used the tag Cardiff) and which is subscribable and available. Having been an advocate of learning objects a few years back (and as a means of writing, I am still a fan), this critical mass was something they never really achieved and so the visions of a personalised course didn't materialise. It also demonstrates, if further demonstration were needed, that making your content available in RSS and accessible (ie not behind authentication) is the key to both getting it seen and to a personalised future.

The last thing was what could an institution like the OU do with something like this, maybe in conjunction with the BBC? Users could receive calendars with appropriate programmes slotted in, maps with relevant  'learning events' highlighted in their locality (which could be user generated e.g. a meeting of the physics club in the Cayo at 8pm), content that relates to both their subject and geographical area (e.g. an example of classic Georgian architecture can be found at...), plus a range of general subject content feeds.

The poetry of webcams

When I first started out on the web, around 1995, I thought web cams were marvellous. They've kind of fallen off my radar since (maybe they've been made a bit grubby). I was playing around with Google Desktop today and one of the widgets you could add was one that cycles through webcam shots from around the world, which you can then call up. I spent an hour or so looking at these, and there is still a thrill at being able to take control of a camera on the other side of the world and turn it to look down the street.

It strikes me that a better writer than I could make something quite moving from the following scenes I observed:

• A single fishing boat putting out to sea from an Italian port
• Cars coming home along the sea front in Japan
• A solitary car driving through the middle of the night in Iowa
• The trees rustling on a campus in Virginia
• A car parked in the rain by a river in New England

Interesting the way that the subscription model and Google Desktop has reawakened my interest in this 'old' technology.