The Ed Techie

The Connected Academic quiz!

In the course I run we developed the concept of the connected learner. I think the connected academic is now also a distinct category. It is more than just engagement with technology, it is to do with attitudes towards value, pedagogy, openness, etc.

Anyway, in a fit of boredom I created the Connected Academic quiz (courtesy of Gotoquiz.com). It's a tongue in cheek affair. Go ahead and try it, it'll only take a minute or so and it might raise a smile. Let me know if you think there are other questions I should have asked.

What value is blogging to your organisation

Today I received an email with an offer to become a paid blogger for Wide Open Education (I'm sure they approached a few people simultaneously).  They, very wisely, want to raise their profile in the blogosphere and were happy to pay someone a reasonable sum to do this. It would be impolite to say how much, not a full salary certainly, but a reasonable amount for someone who could do it as a by-product of their day job. I said no, because although I post on open content and open source, it isn't my main field of interest and so to keep up the volume of posts required I felt it would interfere with my regular job too much. They've got someone now (so don't go sending your CV off), who they probably approached before me as he is a much better choice (I'm not being coy about who it is, but I think they should be allowed to announce it first).

Anyway, this made me realise two things:

i) there is actual, real spendable money to be had in blogging, but you wouldn't set out on it as a career path.

ii) More interestingly the figure they offered gives me at least a benchmark as to how much an organisation values getting a presence in the blogosphere. And they recognise this doesn't come about by just posting lots of corporate news items, but by having thoughtful, interesting pieces that people want to link to (I know what you're thinking - so why'd they go to you then?).

This second point has the virtue of good timing - next week I have my annual work review. I am intent on establishing blogging as a valid academic activity and also one that has strategic and reputational value for the university. I now have a hard figure I can take to my review (they like such things) and say 'look, this is how much someone is willing to pay for the level of blogging activity I currently provide for free' (well, sort of free, it isn't part of my workplan and as such isn't accounted for in my time, but it does arise from work I am paid to do, and sometimes during work hours).  It's not so much that I want financial recompense for it (although, I don't sniff at such things), but more the recognition that it's an activity that should be acknowledged and not something with a vague whiff of 'not doing proper work' about it.

I'll let you know how my 'make blogging valid' campaign goes.

OpenLearn Netvibes Universe

Stuart Brown has developed a Netvibes Universe for openlearn which pulls in all the openlearn material and mixes it with some widgets and tools.  It's neat and reinforces the feeling I've had for a while that Pageflakes and Netvibes are not far off being a learning environment, at least an individual one. The question I ask whenever I see this stuff (usually via Stuart or Tony Hirst) is why are universities, including my own, still persisting in developing their own portals?

Anyway, have a look and a play.

Battleground future

A few people have been blogging about the battle for the future (coming to a cinema near you), particularly as it relates to how people feel about technological change. Stowe Boyd has been getting in to some good discussions. After Virginia Postrel he calls web 2.0 detractors enemies of the future. He says that Postrel “argues that these conflicting views of progress, rather than the traditional left and right, increasingly define our political and cultural debate.” I think there might be something in this. Left and right, as others have argued, are in some ways definitions from the last century. Other polar opposites have been suggested such as fundamentalism and moderatism, east and west, etc. I do wonder how much of my reaction to events is grounded in my general pro-technology and change stance, regardless of left and right.

I don’t go in for the rather confrontational stance of Postrel or Boyd however, particularly in education, there are those who have valid reservations, have seen a lot of it before, and may just take longer to get around to this stuff. I remember Peter Knight saying to me, after I had been disgruntled about a negative reaction to some proposed change, that disruption was one of the things he relished about academic life. My concern about this labelling anyone who doesn't agree with us about the wonders of new technology as an enemy, we are stifling valid debate. But, as I’ve posted before, I think a lot of surface valid reasons often hide a much more fundamental position on technology and change.

And then via John Connell there is a quote from Alan Kay, who inverts his own ‘the best way to predict the future is to invent it’ maxim to ‘the best way to predict the future is to prevent it.’

This did make me stop and think. Rather than just being reticent about change, the opposers could be seen as deliberately trying to limit the future. As Stowe Boyd suggests with web 2.0 we need to let it run. This sense of openness is a real mind shift. I came across a good presentation from Brian Kelly (via Beth’s Blog), who has a quote from Michael Nowlan who says his mantra is now ‘Yes before no; allow before disallow; open rather than closed; connect to the network on a device-agnostic basis.’ That could be an approach for any educator, not just an IT director and is very much about letting go of control – control of content, control of interaction, control of the environment, control of the future.

Email's sick bed

In 1997 John Naughton explained to me that he needed a kind of online journal to keep track of all his thoughts around stuff he found online. He created one himself in HTML. He was describing what we would come to know as a blog. It took me ten years to then become a blogger. So, last week when John said he thought email was unusable now, even though I didn’t have the same sense of it myself, I thought I wouldn’t wait ten years to come to the same conclusion. I was away for 4 days recently, when I came back I had 159 emails (actually quite a low count), of which only 10 were directly relevant, another 20 or so I had been copied in to for interest, the rest were largely irrelevant. That’s not an efficient communication method, and this is now such a common experience that it hardly seems worthy of comment.

John isn’t the only one who feels this way, for instance Brian Kelly has posted that email is (and should) die. Students are using social network sites, Facebook and the like, and within communities subscribing to RSS feeds is now a preferred route for many over mailing lists.

In an earlier post I used a normal distribution curve for the adoption of technology. The front of this is probably uncontroversial, but the tail end might be. As technology becomes part of tradition surely the user base remains high, not decreases. What the email dissatisfaction may demonstrate is that they do decline precisely because they become part of the mainstream. They then become used by the institution, and lose their original appeal. Email used to be excellent because it was informal, as it became part of the formal mechanics, people have started finding other channels to meet their needs. So, I love blogs, and if I really don’t want them to be killed off, I should stop all this promotion of their organisational relevance.

Class divide in Facebook and MySpace

Danah Boyd has an interesting essay about class divide in Facebook and MySpace (in short Facebook = middle class, MySpace = working class). I think there is something in this, I’ve always felt happy promoting Facebook as an educational platform, but I'm a bit snobbish about MySpace. It may be an aesthetic thing, a content thing or even a Murdoch thing, but I, and increasingly more of my colleagues, have a Facebook profile, but we don’t have a MySpace site. It reminds me of when I was young – you were either an ITV or a BBC household, particularly with regards to kids TV. We were BBC – Swap shop instead of Tiswas, Blue Peter instead of Magpie, The Wombles instead of Dangermouse. There seems to be something similar with Facebook and MySpace, which further demonstrates that these platforms are the new broadcast.

Democrats and Revolutionaries (in a technological sense)

Due to popular demand (okay, Scott Leslie asked me to expand on it in a comment), I thought I'd say some more about the notion of democrats and revolutionaries with regards to VLEs. It's set out in chapter 2 of my VLE book, but here's a summary.  I borrowed the idea of technology following a normal distribution curve as it moves in to the mainstream from Wolfgang Greller, (although it all comes from Rogers), particularly the idea that at a certain point institutional responses kick in, such as staff development.

Either side of this institutional tipping point are two distinct groups of academics - the democrats and the revolutionaries. These groups want different things from their technologies. The democrats don't really care how it works, who makes it, what its architecture is and so on - they just want it to work. To them the important characteristics are robustness, ease of use and reliability. Now the revolutionaries are a bit different, they like to know about the technology, to tinker with it, to get it to do what they want. They look for things such as flexibility, adaptability, and a certain amount of technological flair. They like cool stuff, but are happy for it to be a bit flaky.

Now the interesting thing from a centralised VLE perspective is that these two groups are forced to coexist in the same virtual space. This is why those introducing an institutional VLE often have the feeling of not meeting everyone's needs. There exists along the institutional tipping point a creative tension between these two groups, which can be beneficial to both parties. The democrats make the revolutionaries more aware of issues such as rigour and usability and the revolutionaries introduce new technologies and ways of working.

As an aside I think, rather like those sea creatures that survive along deep sea volcanic vents, I have pretty much made my career straddling the line between these two groups.

In defence of Cicero

I watched the first part of the second series of Rome on BBC last night. As I've mentioned before, my favourite Roman (there's a question they never ask pop stars or footballers - favourite meal 'Spaghetti bolognaise', 'Favourite Roman' 'errrm') is Cicero. I think the series does him a disservice and portrays him as rather slimy, and driven only by ambition (Paul Levinson agrees). Now, admittedly he was ambitious and rather ambiguous too in some of his actions, but I've always interpreted him as having the Republic as a concept as his main driving belief. This sometimes forced him in to some uncomfortable alliances, but he was willing to compromise for the good of the republic overall. I admired that, and the fact that he was the academic amongst the great Romans.

I'm probably reading too much in to this, but I'll try it out as a hypothesis - I wonder if the portrayal of the academic rather than the military as slimy has anything to do with it being an HBO joint production. In the current political climate in the US, it seems that academics are rather mistrusted. Making some dodgy connections here, but my feeling of why the neo-cons went to war in Iraq was borne partly out of their inherent distrust of academics, hence they didn't trust or want to hear the complex picture painted by Hans Blix, but instead wanted a simple, decisive strategy. This rather ignored the complexities of the situation in Iraq as is now all too apparent. I'm guessing Bush is more of a Mark Antony kind of guy...

The centralisation/decentralisation dilemma

In my previous post I talked about future learning environments. One of the things about the 'future' scenario (apart from it never turning out quite how you expect it) is that it's very decentralised. It is likely that there won't be one VLE, but rather different flavours of one, depending on the subject area and the individual student. This begins to sound rather familiar - in fact it's rather like the situation many universities are currently shifting away from with their VLE provision. They had a confusing array of VLEs dotted around different faculties, with each area or individual having their pet favourite and now want to consolidate on one centralised system to offer uniform experience and support.

This is entirely appropriate, it saves money, it allows the university to offer staff development and it facilitates integration with other systems. So why would you want to go back to a decentralised state? The point is that in decentralisation 2.0 (sorry) the user is more in control. Previously it was individual academics or faculties who decided. And, it is decentralisation with a centralised underbelly. This is a key point - having first centralised, the systems are in place to provide a blanket framework within which decentralisation can occur. The first wave of centralisation controls everything - all content, all tools, all roles. The second wave moves to a creating a framework (think Netvibes/Pageflakes) within which there is more freedom over content and to a lesser extent, tools. The third wave is totally user controlled. At the moment most universities are in the first wave and just beginning to see the second, I'd say.

Future learning environments (the talk I never gave)

I was supposed to give a keynote at University of London this week, but I was laid up with a really bad chest infection (I blog heroically today). If anyone from there is reading this, my apologies. Below is the talk I was going to give. It was about future learning environments. The first half is familiar stuff - looking at the current state of play and setting out the succession model. The main slide is the penultimate one. Here I wanted to demonstrate all the different dimensions to a future learning environment. So I have the following elements and examples:

• Open content - examples are iTunesU, Openlearn and Slideshare. The point was that good quality content is now readily available and set to grow, so students will be pulling this in from elsewhere not just your centralised system.
• Virtual Presence - examples were Gabbly and Medium. The point here was that you can now have good synchronous engagement around content.
• PLE - examples were Stringle, someone's blog, and Pageflakes. The point I wanted to make was that users will increasingly gather together widgets and tools in a site of their own making.
• Devices - mobile, Microsoft surface and Nintendo Wii. Changes in interface design make different things possible, they also remove many of our reservations about training and development.
• Social Network - Facebook, 43Things, LastFM. Lots of points to make here, including the really powerful ways that Facebook has of motivating users to come back to its site (gifts, status updates, friends, etc) - we don't do this in VLEs. Also the way in which the open API approach means we can go out to them - our VLEs should be feeding into Facebook if that is what students want. And the power of the network to aid content discovery as seen with LastFM, which I've blogged about before.
• Virtual worlds - SecondLife, WorldofWarcraft. Not a lot said on these, but the point about establishing a presence where your students are, e.g. setting up a SL campus, repeated here.
• Learning Design - Compendium, LAMS. With lots of content what you need are tools to string it together to make meaningful pathways.
• User generated content - wikiversity, YouTube, Flickr. The general point that producing content isn't the monopoly of universities in education anymore.