The Ed Techie

Running with the missus

<Image - Cardiff Clowns by Left-hand http://www.flickr.com/photos/left-hand/2964743595/>

As some of you may know, at the end of last year my wife was diagnosed with tongue cancer. Some fairly horrific surgery ensued (grafts of arm skin onto tongue to create a pragmatically termed 'flap', neck dissection to remove lymph glands, further graft from belly to fill the patch on the arm). I'm a queasy male, so clipping toenails has me feeling a bit uneasy, so I have no idea how she endured this.

Then a 6 week dose of radio and chemo-therapy followed. While there are surely no 'good' places to get cancer, one of the insidious elements of it being in the mouth is that as radiotherapy does its business (basically killing cells), you get to taste your own body's decay. Constantly. It would prove to be a very effective torture since there is no escaping it.

After all this though the treatment has been successful and she is now healthier and fitter than ever. Most years we run the Cardiff Half-Marathon, but not usually together, me being all competitive and wanting to improve my time. But this year she set the half-marathon as a goal to mark her recovery, and we'll be running it together. Which brings me on to the inevitably charity call - she has a just-giving page, so if any of you feel like giving, it'd be much appreciated (and no, we won't be running as clowns).

What I talk about when I talk about running

I read Murakami's reflection on running recently (he pinched the title from the first chapter of my VLE book - oh, okay, we both pinched it from Raymond Carver, but I got there first), and it caused me to consider why I run. I started running regularly about four years ago (it's my runiversary!). Before I launch into a meditation on running here are a few facts:

1. I am patently not very good at it. There are people who discover running and a talent is unearthed, they are effortlessly clocking sub-3 hour marathons and a slow training run is faster than I can ever manage. I am not one of these. At my peak I managed a 48 minute 10K. I guess if I trained really hard and changed diet, got a personal trainer I could bring this down, but I am never going to be a 40 minute 10ker, let alone a 30 minute one. Some people start up and within a couple of months are clocking 40 minutes. I am at very best average ie I come in the middle of the pack of a race (although see next point).
2. I am getting worse at it. I used to be an 8 minute miler, but my pace has slipped to around 9 minutes and despite my best efforts I seem unable to reclaim the glory of the first year or so. This could be related to age, or putting on a bit of weight, but I think it's more down to being willing to push myself harder when I was starting out.
3. I frequently don't want to do it and don't enjoy it. I drag myself out and have a miserable, below-par run.

So why do I run? I have rarely gone a week without a run in the past four years, usually run about 4-5 times a week and have taken part in countless (oh, okay, 13) races that I have no chance of doing well in. Let's put aside issues of staying reasonably healthy and weight (which are factors, but probably not my prime motivation). As Murakami says of his writing, he doesn't really compose much while running. I am the same, I could argue that I think through problems, but while I do occasionally, often I don't think of much beyond 'I'm not enjoying this run much.' Having said that, it does give you some clear space and maybe that not thinking of much at all enables you to be focused at other times. I do semi-compose blog posts (hell, even tweets) while running so it has helped with that.

The god things about running? There is something about the nature of the data in running that appeals to me. It's about miles run, pace per mile, top speed, long distance speed, etc. I also like its simplicity (being a simple person at heart), but this very simplicity provides a multitude of ways of approaching it (kind of like Twitter). You can concentrate on a race, different distances, pace, hills, etc. This year, although my pace is rubbish, I am aiming to run 1000 miles over the course of the year. It's not an amazing amount, but it requires a steady approach, and changes the psychology of my running. I am fond of running on holiday and some of my most memorable runs have been in Cornwall, Antigua, Italy and Australia.

But all these are bonuses: the main reason I run is something I've been thinking about a lot lately with regards to online activity - namely, identity. Although I'm not a good runner, I do it regularly enough to feel confident in classifying myself as a runner. In running terms I am a mild underpronator, 8-9 minute miler, half-marathon runner. And that classification matters.

And so on to the inevitable connection with education. Actually I don't think the link is as arduous to make as I sometimes manage - running is a lot like learning. You don't have to be the best in a subject, you 'compete' against yourself, you find different strategies, you need different motivations, and we define ourselves by what we express a preference for. And the analogy holds true if we consider formal and informal learning. I don't belong to a running club and I mainly engage in informal learning. But for the sake of motivation and the experience I like to take part in formal events, ie races, and occasionally I might want to have my learning formally recognised. The two can exist quite happily and to each other's mutual benefit in running, so why not in education?

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.

The Christmas Twitter Game

I'm a (not very good) runner, and one of the discussions that often comes up this time of year is whether you will go for a run on Christmas day. The responses tend to fall into 5 categories:

1. Of course, it's just another day and I've got to stick to my training schedule.
2. It's great to get some exercise in before all that indulgence.
3. No, it's kind of showing off, declaring 'look how committed I am, I run on Christmas day'
4. Yes, I like to show off and declare 'look how committed I am, I run on Christmas day'
5. I'd like to but I'm too hung over from Christmas Eve

If we replace running with twittering (or Facebooking or blogging if you prefer), then we have an ed tech equivalent. I wonder who will be up on Christmas day posting tweets such as 'opening a bad jumper from my parents' or 'eating a fifth mince pie'. I'm declaring now that I'm out - no tweets from me on Christmas day.

The Christmas Twitter Game - I'm compiling a secret list of people who I think will twitter on the day itself, and come boxing day I'm going to score my predictive powers. Hey it beats watching the Wizard of Oz on TV again.   

Shaming yourself in to action

I like this: in an attempt to shame himself into losing weight, Kerry Buckley has a Big Visible Belly graph showing on his blog, which shows his fluctuation around his ideal weight - over and it records in red and under it shows in green.

This use of the blog to expose some aspect of yourself to the audience and thus force action got me thinking. What else could you use it for? I would probably like to record my running, with a weekly target. But anything you procrastinate over would be a contender - you could go for study hours, progress through Remembrance of Things Past, number of alcohol units consumed (depending on whether you wanted to drink more or less), blog posts even.

I think the visual element is important - you get an instant nudge if it's largely red. So is the pressure from the audience - this only needs to be perceived, none of your audience actually needs to care or comment, but the fact that it is public is sufficient. Another Facebook app maybe?

Road to Beijing

This is interesting (if you like running). Alexander Vero was a reasonable amateur marathon runner, but has set himself the target of qualifying for the next Olympics. He is a documentary maker, so his aim is to show just how tough it is. He knows he probably won't achieve it, but wants to document the effort it takes to get close. As a not very good runner, I find it inspiring, but what has been interesting is the criticism he has received from elite athletes. Far from underestimating the challenge or thinking anyone can do it, what he is illustrating is how hard you have to train and also the limits of natural ability. I don't know why elite athletes would find this insulting. He has even suffered the worse term of abuse for a runner and been called a 'jogger.' Ouch. Anyway, worth tracking his progress, he is aiming for 2hrs 30mins in the Paris marathon.

Running, VLEs, e-learning and democratisation

Warning - this post is a desperate attempt to combine all my interests in one posting.

I took part in my first half-marathon on Sunday (Cardiff, naturally). Like many runners I have come to it relatively late in life (I started last year in earnest). One of the many things I like about running is its very democratic nature. It really is a sport for everyone. All you need is a pair of trainers (in theory that is, I also find an ipod, GPS tracker and hi tech fabrics essential also, so I resemble some form of cyborg, but these are really just luxuries). It encompasses all manner of ability, ages, backgrounds and motivations.

It struck me that this notion of democratisation is something of an underlying theme in my interests, almost by accident. I work at the Open University, the aim of which was to democratise higher education. I was part of the team responsible for the OU course,  T171 You your computer and the Net in 1999, which had around 15,000 students and arguably did a lot to open up understanding of the internet. Next week I am giving a keynote in Barcelona entitled 'VLEs and the democratisation of e-learning', in which I will argue that although VLEs are  not the most exciting or innovative technology around, they have done a lot to democratise e-learning for many academics, in the same way that Microsoft products are often not the best, but the end-result is that they have brought computing to a much wider audience.

However, I think I am guilty of a lazy shorthand here, whereby I drop the word 'democratisation', with the assumption that it is necessarily  a good thing. This is not so - one could view terrorism for example as the democratisation of warfare. Some things are not, or should not, be susceptible to democratisation - talent is a good example. The plethora of reality TV shows (such as X-Factor, Pop Idol, Big Brother etc) can be presented as a democratisation of talent, or celebrity. But they rarely produce anything of quality. Talent, is by its nature, exclusive and undemocratic.