The Ed Techie: IT services

Brian Kelly has a good slidecast talking about exploiting the social aspects of web 2.0. He gave a similar talk with the title 'Web 2.0 - what if we're wrong?' and in Twitter I tried to argue that even if we're wrong, we're right, but struggled with the 140 character limit, so I'll put my argument here.

Brian makes a good case about avoiding the Gartner Hype Curve where you have rising expectations, which are not met, and then a trough of despair (I can't embed the actual slide direct, but it's slide 19). He is right about this, and the possible risks. Many web 2.0 companies don't have a sustainable business model, and there is undoubtedly some hype amongst all of this. Brian gives a good account of how these risks can be overcome without retreating from the brave new world. His angle is from IT services, but I want to broaden out his argument.

Just as with the initial dot com bubble, the fact that there is hype doesn't mean that the overall direction isn't correct. It may not completely change the world in the next 18 months, but it will significantly change the world in the next 5 years. Ewan McIntosh digs up a great quote from Clifford Stoll in 1995 saying (amongst much pooh-poohing of this internet stuff):

"Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping - just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?”

Few would doubt we do all of those things online now, and much more. So even if the e-commerce enthusiasts were wrong about the speed and extent of change back then, they were more right than Stoll was in dismissing it.

And that's the case with social networking, web 2.0, user generated content, liberation of content, etc. Even if it doesn't turn out as some enthusiasts predict there is one key point that the detractors always miss - it will never go back to how it was. After wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, iTunes, etc the idea that consumers of newspapers, books, music, television, and yes, education, will realise it was all just a silly mistake and go back to how it was may be what the industry leaders dream of, but is unlikely, to say the least.

Which brings me on to my even if we're wrong, we're right argument. Sure things won't be the utopian vision of free services, open education and democratisation that some talk of, but whatever comes after the current trends will build on top of them. Just as web 2.0 built on what had happened in the first wave of web development. And the people who got it, the founders and the visionaries weren't people who had dismissed the web and insisted it would go away. They were people who engaged with it, and could see how to take it forward. So, whatever comes after web 2.0 (don't say web 3.0), the people best placed to understand it and adapt to it will be those who have immersed themselves in the current technological climate, and not those who have sat waiting for it to fail so they can say 'told you so.'

Niall Sclater raises some issues around potential dangers of outsourcing your IT services, picking up on my recent decision to go all things Google. Niall is referring to a talk by Alan Bell and the two particular potential problems he raises are:

1. You tell your students to use a system hosted externally, maybe one which downloads client software to the learners’ machine. A student’s system gets corrupted and they claim that your institution is liable.

2. You use a free externally hosted collaboration system for audio conferencing for a tutorial and a student tells you during the session that they can’t complete an assignment due to a bereavement. You take no note of this and it slips your mind. Because there is no accessible record of the session you’re again opening up your institution to a liability.

I would say the first of these - not really an issue, since most of what we're talking about are web based services anyway. The second might be an issue, and is part of the broader issue of having less direct control. A similar problem might be that a student claims a particular system was down, or the student says they haven't read a message, etc. All of these are verifiable when you have integrated systems with monitoring. I would say that I think monitoring as an excuse to use internal systems is overplayed, since no-one actually uses it much, and you have other tools available, e.g. Google analytics, but let's ignore that for now, and think about how this might be addressed.

The first way would be to decide on core services that you really need to host internally. Assignment handling might be one. I suspect the danger with this approach is that some people would soon argue that everything is a core service.

The second approach is to use reliable third party services who you have some level of partnership, or at least discussion with. So you can at least ask them if their system was down. The danger with this approach is that it would soon be pulled in to the institutional bureaucracy and before you know they would be demanding that Slideshare (or whoever) sign a service level agreement.

The third approach is to spread risk. By having a range of activities and systems, then failure in any one is mitigated as students can do something else. This is a definite advantage over the centralised system as when that goes down, everything is lost.

The fourth factor is to have a light integration touch between institutional systems and third party apps, that can at least offer a degree of monitoring. I'm not sure if institutionally hosted authorisation services would do the trick, but this kind of thing.

And the last approach is probably the most interesting and not related to technology at all. And that is to engage with, and trust, your students more and create more activity based courses. A lot of these 'issues' are only issues when you need to be directing students to do very specific tasks. If one adopts a more research, activity based pedagogy then some (not all) of these issues become legitimate problems for the student to work around.