The Ed Techie

The value of content

It has often occurred to me that TV companies don't make enough of their content, particularly in relation to films. You will often come across a truly great film either sandwiched inbetween soap operas or tucked away at midnight on one of their smaller channels. This was brought home to me again recently when I watched Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time (Redux) on Film 4. It is a sumptuous film (and I haven't seen the original, which film buffs, naturally, say is vastly superior to the Redux version). Watching it I wanted to know more (partly to figure out what was going on, but also because you know it's a film that excites comment), so I browsed the IMDB reference, and also came across these interviews with the director on YouTube.

Now on TV you might get a 10 second introduction from the announcer and that's it. Why couldn't they put together some discussion or analysis programme before a film? They'd be dead cheap to make - you get some film buffs in a room and let them talk. This isn't going to be a massive draw, I accept, but if you trailer it enough it pulls in an extra audience for the film, it makes the showing of the film more of an event. And then you have maybe one of the experts interacting on twitter while the film is showing. Making TV an event is the new name of the game. My feeling though is that broadcasters are generally scared of anything vaguely 'intellectual' and underestimate their audience.

Sports TV has been good at wringing value from its content - as a football fan I used to watch a programme in which Jimmy Hill sat around with four newspaper journalists and they talked about the sports reporting in newspapers for an hour. It has to be the cheapest form of television around, and yet for a certain audience, it's worthwhile.

In a world where content is free and abundant I think there is a bigger message in this, beyond me wanting a film-bore bonanza. So here is my content-value advice: When there is lots of content it makes all content seem devalued, but the way to add value to content is to add more content to it, to provide context and interpretation. And if there isn't something in this for educators, then we're all wasting our time.

A Pedagogy of Abundance take 2

I gave a presentation for George Siemens CCK09 course last night, which explored an idea I had proposed in this blog a while back, on the pedagogy of abundance. I wanted to explore the idea, so talked for half an hour and then we had a good discussion. You can see the recording of the session in Elluminate here.

Below is a slidecast of the presentation. My main argument was that in economics previous models were based on an assumption of scarcity. In a digital world we have abundance and many of these models do not apply. There are two types of response to this, the abundance response which assumes it and the scarcity response which tries to recreate scarcity models in a digital format. Freemium is an example of the former and DRM an example of the latter. I then explore whether there are similar arguments to be made for pedagogy based on the following assumptions:

• Content is free
• Content is abundant
• Content is varied
• Sharing is easy
• Social based
• Connections are lite
• Organisation is cheap
• Based on a generative system
• Crowdsourcing
• Network is valuable

A pedagogy of abundance

View more presentations from mweller.

How do you connect - the rise of serendipity

D'Arcy Norman has set up a project which asks the simple question 'How do you connect to people online'. He says we are free to interpret that how we want, and responses can be in any format. He is publishing the open responses as it goes along. Many people have chosen to respond in video format, and here is my offering:

There different ways of interpreting the question, so I gave four answers. There is the purely technical, practical answer - so I connect mainly through twitter and this blog, plus a bunch of other tools. But there is also a set of behaviours associated with connecting, so you do it by linking (and being linked to - I find a lot of people because they link to my blog, and my blog stats tell me this, hey presto, we're connected), commenting (on blogs, or in twitter), responding to requests, cries for help, etc, but really it's about sharing. There is the social element to connecting, so I engage in debates (which can be related to work but might are as often about tv, football, politics), making jokes, giving people answers or experience, and what we might call just chatting. And the fourth way of responding to the question is to think in terms of fundamental principles one operates on which I list as embrace serendipity and be open.

I've probably said lots on the latter, but the serendipity comment can probably bear a little more examination. In an earlier post about Science 2.0 I wondered if scientists struggled with the web 2.0 approach because so much of it was about unpredictability and this went against their scientific training. Serendipity has come to the fore in the socially connected world I believe. It's no longer an eccentric relation at the family gathering, who may give you a great song on the piano but equally may wet their pants and fall asleep at the dinner table. Two things have changed the status of serendipity: the number of connections and the ease of connecting. Now you can rely on serendipity - something will turn up which is relevant, you just don't know what it is. 

Here is Jim Groom also responding to D'Arcy's project, who makes the point that these technologies allow us to 'imbue our work with a sense of personality':

So, how do you connect?

7 conversation starters

In a post about how twitter had changed my ALT-C experience I commented that we needed to find new social behaviours for when we meet people face to face who we know well on twitter. And Jim Groom is always saying how it's the personal element that makes blogs meaningful. So, in the spirit of those '7 things you didn't know about me' memes, although hopefully less annoying, I thought I'd give 7 conversation starters for occasions when I might meet people I know virtually, and we don't want to talk about blogging or twitter. I think everyone should have a social crib sheet, particularly with the advent of mobile devices now - if you're on your way to a meeting with someone, call up their conversation starters page and you instantly have grounds for a social connection.

1. As a child I was a bit koumpounophobic - I had a fear of buttons. Couldn't stand them being separate, or to touch them. If someone said 'I've lost a button' then that room became a no-go zone. I was also not very keen on jewellery. Of course it doesn't bother me now, I can do up a shirt with the best of them. Interestingly, although I've never mentioned or displayed it, my daughter doesn't like buttons either and won't wear clothing that has them if she can help it. This is, to me, an example of the strange subtlety of genetics.
   So I'm happy to talk about childhood phobias, genetics, nature versus nurture, etc.
2. I like most non-offal based foods and am constantly amazed at how fussy a lot of grown-ups are. But I have never been able to stomach baked beans and hate the insidious way they infect a whole plate of food. And celery of course, but then no-one really likes celery do they?
   We can chat about the nightmares of organising a dinner party with a range of fussy eaters, food dislikes, disgusting things you have eaten, etc.
3. My favourite authors are Graham Greene, Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, Dickens, William Boyd, Nabokov, Conrad. The sharp ones amongst you will have spotted that this is an entirely male list. This is not the result of a deliberate policy - it's not as if I boycott women writers. I read and like a lot (Margaret Atwood, Iris Murdoch, George Eliot, Zadie Smith are all good, although Austen and the Brontes don't do much for me) but my favourites are all men. This can't just be coincidence can it? There must be something in their writing that appeals to me. So if we discount blatant sexism as the reason for my tastes (of course, you may not), it might be interesting to consider why this is so? You could maybe convince me away from my male preference in literary tastes.
4. I grew up in the age of the home video-player, and this was probably the most significant technology in my formative years (far more than early computers). As a teenager there was a group of us who used to occasionally bunk off school and go to someone's house to watch a range of video nasties: Driller Killer, I Spit on your Grave, Rollerball (game scenes only), The Thing, Quadrophenia (we were mods), Dawn of the Dead, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, My Bloody Valentine. These were the staple diet, and yet I didn't grow up a disturbed individual and later went onto be a fan of 'nicer' cinema (I cry at It's A Wonderful Life every year), so we can talk about the impact of violence in films, influential technologies, etc.
5. I like to drink tea, beer and wine, not necessarily at the same time, and probably in that order of preference. I have a vague mistrust of people who drink 'flavoured tea'. I have the potential to become a beer bore. I once had an exchange with Alastair Campbell on the merits of tea over coffee (we were in agreement). I don't like spirits, except gin and tonic naturally. I thought when I reached 40 I would suddenly develop a taste for whisky. Recently someone poured me a very fine whisky but I had to concede defeat - every minuscule sip made me want to gag. I fully accept this proves I am a wimp.
6. The first gig I went to was The Beat at the Rainbow Club in London. I was thirteen and it was full of burly skinheads. When The Beat came on it erupted and the whole floor was bouncing. I had grown up in the suburbs and found it both exhilarating and frightening. I spent about 4 years going to lots of gigs after that, but now I don't get much from them. Martin Amis once commented that at some age all men stop going to football games. I disagree with that, but I do feel that about gigs - I don't want to stand at the back and clap politely and I certainly don't want to be down the front anymore, so I'm not sure I see the point in them. Good bands I saw in that period: The Jam, New Order, Happy Mondays, Echo and theBunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, Billy Bragg, The Cure. Embarrassing acts: Ultravox, Toyah, King.
7. I once won a film review competition judged by Mark Kermode. I wrote a critical piece on Rodriguez' Sin City. My argument was that people loved it because it was 'stylish', but for me it wore its style too obviously. Martin Scorsese once complained that the Oscar for Best wardrobe or similar always went to a costume drama, but as much detail went in to a film set in the 1950s. I think the same is true of Sin City, other films have better style, it's just not as blatant. I also argued that Hollywood continues to make the mistake that graphic novels make good films because they have similar elements - strong visual style, linear narrative, often based around good vs evil, etc. But the results are nearly always poor, maybe because as with traditional novels, the differences between the mediums are underestimated, or because graphic novels are a bit rubbish to start with (ducks).
   Happy to discuss Sin City, novel adaptations or to have you defend graphic novels.

If none of those work for you, pick one from: Spurs, running, Wales/Cardiff, daughters.

Remote conference participation - results

Last week I set up a discussion around the changing nature of conferences and particularly how remote, vicarious participation was impacting upon them and our practice. There has been some excellent discussion over in Cloudworks, so please check that out if the subject interests you.

I also set up a quick 5 question survey on how people found remote participation. I had 53 responses (quite good I thought), so here are the results.

The first three questions asked about how remote participation compared with face to face attendance on some of the main functions of conferences, namely networking, content and socialising. Here are the results:

So for networking most people ranked it as between 25% and 50% as good as attending face to face, while for accessing the content, most people ranked it as around 75% as effective. Unsuprisingly, socialising didn't fare as well, with most people ranking it between 25% as good and no good at all.

The next question was a bit vague, but I wanted to get an impression of how 'green' people reckoned remote participation was compared with face to face attendance. This will obviously depend on lots of factors such as where the conference is, how they travel, what the facilities are like, how green their own energy supply is and how we interpret 'greenness' anyway. But to gauge an overall impression I thought it was worthwhile (of course people's impression could be wrong, this isn't based on actual CO2 emission data). Here are the results:

 

Perhaps no surprises here either, most people ranking it between 75% and 100% greener.

Lastly, I asked about how much time remote participation took compared with face to face attendance:

This came in around 25% as the most popular response.

I think this gives us an interesting starting point for a conversation about conferences. To put it simply the question we can ask goes something like "If you can achieve 50% networking, get 75% of the content for 25% of the time and it's 75% greener, then what are the real benefits of attending?". I don't want to say remote attendance is better, or that we should do away with traditional conferences, but we probably need to be clearer as to what we get from attending, and maybe trade some of our face to face attendance for remote participation. There is also an argument that institutions/managers could allocate specific time to allow people to 'attend' remotely, given the benefits it offers.

Over in the cloudworks discussion Alan Cann picked up on something more intangible - the manner in which attending 'real' conferences liberates us from much of the day to day work and provides us with thinking room or 'headspace'. I find this to be true for myself - many good ideas I have for research, projects, books, journal articles, blog posts, etc come when I'm at conferences. So we need to acknowledge that and cherish it I think.

The other issue is the way in which conferences themselves need to change to accommodate this, and we are seeing lots of examples of this, from streaming, designated live-bloggers, aggregators, hybrid approaches, satelitte conferences, etc.