The Ed Techie

The Twitter commandments

(via Alan Levine) Phillie Casablanca issues some Twitter commandments, which are worth looking at. Some people have objected to the term 'commandments' - it's a stylistic device folks! He doesn't really mean them to be obeyed absolutely, it's just that it's meant to be a bit of fun and calling it 'Some practical suggestions on Twitter behaviour' doesn't allow for the same punch really.
Anyway, I particularly like:

1. Thou shalt not tweet more than 20 times a day. This has a detrimental effect on everyone else's ambient intimacy with their group.

3.Thou shalt not tweet more than 10 times in an hour*. That's what blogging is for.

and

9. Thou shalt type people's usernames correctly (e.g. @Casablanca); otherwise the 'replies' function doesn't work.

I'm not so keen on:

6. Thou shalt not forget that the question being asked is "What are you doing?".

I think this is the way in to Twitter, but its use has evolved beyond this. For instance, Ewan Macintosh was giving a presentation to some people at Oxford yesterday and put a call out on Twitter to a) say hello and b) give suggestions for use of Twitter in learning a foreign language. This was during his live presentation I gather. This was a very good use of Twitter, but isn't really answering the question 'What are you doing?'

I'd also add these two commandments:

11. Thou shalt not follow more than 1,000 people (unless thou art Scoble)

12. Thou shalt not use Twitter as a broadcast medium for your website or business - it's about conversation (yes that means you Guy Kawasaki)

Social objects in education

There's been lots of talk about social objects over the past year. A social object is something (it can be real or virtual) that facilitate conversation, and thus social interaction (Hugh MacLeod gives a good overview of them). Hugh argues that social networks are built around social objects, not vice versa. This may not be true of ego-centric networks, but certainly is for task-centric ones such as Flickr. Hugh's take on them is from a marketing perspective, but as someone who's interested in applying web 2.0 to education, the question I'd want to answer is 'what would a social object be in education?'

On campus that's probably pretty obvious - it can be the lecture or workshop, a book or an article. Online I guess the answer is 'content'. This may seem obvious, but it's significant because poor old content is often shoved to one side in the unseemly scramble to praise dialogue, interaction, community and collaboration. If we take the social object line however, content isn't a nice add-on, it's the starting point for any successful social network (or read community if you prefer).

So this reinstates some of the significance of content, but content-producers shouldn't feel smug because there are a host of implications to this. For a start, it suggests that content only matters to the extent that it acts as a social object. This means that your content has to be good social content - this is not necessarily the same as what we usually think of as good academic content. For instance, content that may be imperfect is often good for encouraging others to participate, or content that is contentious may be better at stimulating debate. The very hard lesson for academics here is that the educational value is not in the content itself but the social interaction it begets.

It also means that content has to exist within a framework of appropriate tools which have the right affordances for the type of social interaction, and within a network of users who use the social objects as nodes.

So, to summarise we need three things for a social object driven mode of education:

1. Content that acts as a social object
2. Tools that facilitate social interaction around these objects
3. A community of learners who find the social objects engaging

Getting that mix right won't be easy, but my guess is that if you do, it'll take off.

Twitter business models - a modern day case study

(Image courtsey Bootload, via diy.despair.com)

Over the New Year there was some discussion about Twitter's business model (naturally I found out about it through my Twitter stream). This isn't particularly new, David Chartier suggested six ways Twitter could make money back in April. Allen Stern started this round of discussion, asking is Twitter F'ed? He argues that the Twitter client, Twitterific makes money by charging for the software, while Twitter hasn't made any money. Given that Twitter is chewing up bandwidth they'll need to find a viable business model soon. Stern argues that going for the approach of eyeballs first, business model later may backfire.

The ever reliable Dave Winer responds succinctly, arguing that Twitterific reaches only a very small percentage of Twitter's overall audience. If you had to choose, you'd want the big free audience over the small fee paying one. He suggests they could make their own client, but more importantly:

there are lots of ways for Twitter to make money once there are enough users. And right now their business is to grow and their first priority is to stabilise their service

Stowe Boyd suggests another method, that of reusing Twitter's social stream in other applications:

if third parties wanted to build other apps that use a twitter-esque social stream, they might make an agreement to reuse the twitter pathway. .. As long as I could push stuff through the pipe, I would be willing to pay a per message bulk deal. And I believe that the notion of a common social stream -- being reused by many apps -- is a big chewy idea.

Whatever the model is, the discussion is a case study in modern day economics. There are a number of interesting elements to it I think. Firstly, it seems that normal economics doesn't seem to apply. As is often stated, economics is the study of scarcity, and we are dealing with abundance. So what is the pricing model that works here? It may be that old school economics triumphs, you can't beat the old dogs, but it does seem here is a service that is hugely popular and useful. If it can't be made to work economically then there is something wrong with the structure of the market and our theories, not with the product itself.

Secondly, it is the ideal representation of the get the eyeballs approach to new businesses. This may be restricted to the US, I think Twitter would have struggled to get funding from UK venture capitalists. The conversation would have gone:

Twitter - "We've got this great idea for a service, we've trialled it and take-up is phenomenal. Here are the projected usage figures" (Shows graph with big staircase jumping off the top of the axis)

VCs - "Woooh, we like it! And so, what's your business model? How do you monetise all those users?"

Twitter - "We haven't figured that yet. Don't worry, we'll come up with something later."

VCs - "Bye"

Lastly, I like the way the community itself is chipping in with suggestions for what would be a good business model. In David Chartier's post he quotes Evan Williams (one of Twitter's founders) saying that "Our top concern when it comes to monetisation will be to do so in a way that does not negatively impact users."  And it seems that the Twitter community is willing to help them do that.

If I was an academic in a Business School, I'd be looking at Twitter as a test bed for how the new economics pans out.

Songs for a funeral

AJ has a post about using lettermelater (a means of posting future emails) to send a message about your funeral preferences. He limits himself to 3 songs, so here are my choices:

1. Pyramid song - radiohead. Get 'em all weepy and reflective.

2. Dress sexy at my funeral - Smog. C'mon, you'd have to go for this.

3. Bankrobber - The Clash. Leave 'em humming, and because there are no songs about being an educational technologist.

Reminds me of an idea floated over at the half-bakery a few years back for the Fatal Auto Collision Song that would detect when you had been in a fatal crash and would play your pre-selected choice. You would thus be spared the final insult of spending your last few minutes being forced to listen to Britney on the radio.

Logyourrun quick review

My running rather tailed off towards the end of last year (in favour of mince pies and beer) so for the new year have a new schedule set up. I came across a 2.0 running site - logyourrun. Here's a quick review:

• The ability to share training schedules is useful. I created my own, but as is often the case, used others for inspiration.
• Having all your running tools in one place is really useful. I used to use gmap-pedometer to plot my routes, but logyourrun has Google maps embedded so you can create a set of routes to choose from. When you come to log your run you can then select the route you took and it will add in the distance and calculate pace, etc. There are also blogs, forums, etc.
• It has reasonable graphing functions, showing your pace against your schedule.
• The syntax for the running schedule you create is rather limited. It only recognises 'miles', 'rest' (I'm good at this one) and 'cross'. So if you use any other terms it doesn't add the distance in. As a runner I'd want terms such as hills, race, fartlek, pace, tempo and easy to be available so I could create a more sophisticated training plan.
• It doesn't allow goals to be set in terms of time as far as I can see, only distance. If you are aiming for a race goal, then it's not that you ran 6 miles in a training session that is important but that you did it at the required pace.
• It does have a blog widget - this was my main reason for signing up (although I've since found out Nike+ does this now as well, but my iPod Nano suffered an ignoble death when it was washed along with my kit). This is great, a while ago I blogged about shaming yourself into action (after Kerry Buckley's visible belly graph). Making my running log public is a motivating factor. I know that no-one else really cares, but having it public makes you less likely to skip sessions (or more likely to lie about it). One has to be careful about this public display of all actions however - the default setting when creating routes is to make it public, but as most of mine go from my house, this is potentially dodgy.

some iPod touch thoughts

I got an iPod touch for Christmas and using it has brought home a few things to me. These are all from the department of the bleeding obvious but for what it's worth here they are:

Firstly the interface is just lovely to use. It makes me want to pick it up and play with it. This goes beyond mere practicality - I could probably find other devices that offer me the same functionality, but I wouldn't feel the same impulse to use them as I do with the touch.

Next, being wi-fi enabled has really brought home the "web as platform" concept. I've talked about this lots of times but having a tool with a locked operating system makes it real. My first instinct was to think "I need to install some apps" but of course I didn't. With wi-fi I can access docs, organizer, spreadsheet, etc

Following on from this some sites are better than others. A few have specially designed iphone sites which offer reduced functionality but with neater design. Mentions go to remember the milk, google reader, facebook and typepad.

Now a negative - no Flash in Safari and from what I can gather no way of installing it. You can do a Jailbreak hack which allows you to install a couple of the apps that are on the iPhone, but it seems Adobe and Apple haven't worked out a version of Flash that functions with the pinch and drag interface. It's not clear if this is technical or political.

Lastly it has made me appreciate the value of instant start-up and access. Often I just want to check something quickly but my laptop has gone into hibernation, takes ages to reboot and then freezes, by which time I've lost the will to do it. With the touch it's there straight away. This makes certain types of activity easier - for instance twittering, so expect to see more updates.

Oh, it's taught me one more thing too - my wife gets me better presents than I get her.
(This post was produced on an iPod touch)