The Ed Techie

SatNav - a microstudy in digitisation

<Image Mapa antiguo de America del Sur - thejourney1972>

We have only recently got a SatNav system for the car (it's invaluable if you are towing a caravan, no matter how small and trendy, as doing 3-point turns is not easy, or popular). Using it has made me reflect on how the process of digitisation and connectivity changes behaviour and our relation to certain artefacts. I think what is true of SatNav and maps, is probably true across all forms of content.

Here are the changes as I see them:

1. The need for a particular skill (in this case map reading) which was previously thought essential becames largely irrelevant.
2. This democratises the behaviour for use by nearly all member of society (navigation).
3. The skill becomes highly specialised then, and possibly as a result, highly valued when it is needed.
4. We gain in functionality because the community can create content - we have map mashups, numerous filters placed on maps, regular updates, recommended routes, new voices (Darth Vader "You have reached the dark side), etc.
5. The presence of the tool begins to alter behaviour. A small example, but when driving in France over the summer, we were more likely to explore because we could put in a destination, or a place of interest and not have to be concerned how we would get back to our original destination - the SatNav will do that for us. It has also removed the need to shout at each other while wrestling with a map.
6. We lose some of the richness and affection that is attached to a physical artefact, particularly with a history, in this case, maps - these are a thing of romantic wonder. Authors will not write of SatNav systems:

"when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my  finger on it and say, 'When I grow up I will go there.'"

Quick play with xtranormal

Tony pointed me at Xtranormal (and the CogDog reminded me that Tony had pointed me at it). It's a service that allows you to create little movies, adding in dialogue, camera angles, music, expressions, etc.

So, while having my ham sandwich for lunch I had a quick play and produced the following. It's not very good, but you get the idea:

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A better one is this take on FightClub.

Documentally is waki

The other day social media journalist documentally was invited by Reuters to attend Gordon Brown's press conference. Being a streaming video kinda guy (to put it mildly), he streamed live via Qik:

This went around on Twitter, and I tuned in. It occurred to me that I wouldn't have bothered to watch it live on TV, so why did I watch this time?

Partly it was out of curiosity, this being one of the the first times social media type journalists have been in on a big, proper news event (ie a non-techie one). So I wanted to see what it was like.

But there was also an element of feeling more connected to the events. It seemed more like a personal invitation to tune in (I don't know Documentally, aka Christian, but a few of the OU folks do). This made me reflect that we have become rather distant from traditional journalists. Because you engage much more in a dialogue and the everyday aspects of a social media journalist, one can view them as your representative.

Creating a character that acts as the audience's representative, or a proxy for the reader in literature, is a common enough tactic. In Shakespeare, Falstaff and the Fool (in Lear) perform this function, and in Japanese theatre the secondary role of waki is often seen as the embodiment of the audience. I'm not an expert in journalism, but it seems to me that social media provides a means of increasing this relationship with the audience. This can be true even with 'conventional' journalists - for example if the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones tweets that he is appearing on the news, I'm probably more likely to tune in and watch it, because I've been following his process in creating the story.

Ed Tech posters - come get 'em

I'll do a slidecast of my broadcast talk in a few days, but thought I'd share a couple of the images I adapted from Flickr photos. They'll soon be adorning student bedroom walls everywhere.

(Original image Kent Wang - We must liberate Taiwan: http://flickr.com/photos/kentwang/34405544/sizes/o/)

And this one inspired by Brian Kelly's talk where he suggested we all have an inner geek, called Ellis:

 

(Original image Mattham - Yoda Dog Costume: http://flickr.com/photos/matthamm/285952194/)

And from my content video, James Boyle's  Internet Holy Trinity:

 

(Original image Zen - Fog birds telephone wire close: http://flickr.com/photos/zen/1209773/

Quote is John Perry Barlow)

(original image Guille - Freedom http://flickr.com/photos/cguille/2556176764/

Quote is Stewart Brand)

(Quote is John Gilmore)

Your search is valuable to us

Tony was giving a talk yesterday as part of a workshop with me and Grainne, to the OU Library and he said something I hadn't really appreciated before - namely that because Google refines its search results based on your history (if you are signed in to Google), the results, say, that Tony gets will be different from the ones you or I get. I know it came out in 2005, I told you I was slow on the uptake.

This made me think that your search history is actually valuable, because the results you get back are a product of the hours you have invested in previous searches and the subject expertise in utilising search terms. So, if you are an expert in let's say, Alaskan oil fields, and have been researching this area for years, then the Google results you get back for a search on possible new oil fields will be much more valuable than the results anyone else would get.

There are a couple of interesting implications to this. Firstly, just as people who don't have the time will pay others to build up their characters for them in virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft, so the time you have invested in your search history may become a valuable commodity. Time is the commodity we don't have enough of, and anything that can only be realised through the investment of time has some value to someone.

Secondly, if you can assemble and utilise the expert search of a network of people, then you can create a socially powered search which is very relevant for learners. Want to know about really niche debates in evolution? We've utilised Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones and Matt Ridley's search history to give you the best results. Or if you prefer, the search is performed as the aggregation of a specialist community.

You can see how this would play in a SocialLearn type context - the benefit of belonging to the network is that you gain access to a collective search refinement. And in a Google World search almost equals  knowledge. Of course, this would require some means of you opening up your search history to be used by others, in a way that a) didn't reveal all of your searches (if you're an eminent historian you don't really want everyone to know the time you searched for 'Who is Paris Hilton?') and b) didn't corrupt your search data, in the same way as when you buy gifts for someone in Amazon and your recommendations get screwed. (Because I buy books for my parents I get recommended a range of London in the Blitz books - who knew there were so many?).

Anyone know if such a thing is in operation anywhere?

I was slow to get Qik

I'd seen a bit of chat about the video service Qik (mainly from Scoble's twitter feed), and AJ is always trying to get us converted to Seesmic, but I hadn't really been enthused, seeing at just another way of capturing video on the web. Then this week I had a chat with OU geek/EEE evangelist Liam and he wanted to show me Qik on the mobile.

So we had a qik go with it, and minor epiphany moment - of course, it's only when you see it in conjunction with mobile technology that it makes sense. Nearly everyone has video capability on their phones, but the problem is that it uses up memory. But Qik streams to their server, so you are not storing it locally. Now I get it! We're all broadcasters on the move now. The educational possibilities of this are intriguing, and we want to explore them for SocialLearn. As well as streaming events, I like the notion of using it as your own journal - recording half thoughts, ideas, tasks, etc and linking these to your goals. There are some nice touches, eg you can set it up to automatically post to Twitter, YouTube, etc

Never let it be said that I am qik on the uptake (ok, that's enough qik/quick puns). Here is the vid we shot when playing around:

A new way of giving?

My colleague, Juliette Culver, is involved in an interesting project called Operation Sleeper Cell. It's an online multi-user game, with challenges, puzzles, etc. Juliette describes it thus:

It’s free to play and there are puzzles, creative challenges, a story to follow, events in real life, and lots of top secret stuff that I’d love to tell you about but can’t. The game lasts ten weeks and there are new missions each week. If you enjoy things like treasure hunts, you should enjoy this I hope!

Nothing particularly new there (although it looks a good example of its genre). The really interesting part is that they've developed it for Cancer Research. You can donate directly, if you feel you're getting good value from the game, or buy cells in the grid to advertise.

This strikes me as a good example of several behaviours combining beneficially. It takes the open source motivation to be involved in an interesting project to get free developers, adds in the 'pay what you like' freakonomics model from Radiohead and others, mixes up the addictive elements of gaming and sprinkles with people's tendency to want to give to charity.

Who knows if it'll work, but it could be a real model of fundraising for the future. Of course, if they did a 'be a virtual educational technologist' one, then they'd be on to a real winner.

iTunes nonplus

I had a strange experience with iTunes Plus recently that left me scratching my head at the logic of DRM.

I was trying to create a playlist and realised an album I had bought a while ago wasn't in my library (Chet Baker Sings, if you're interested - it's melloooooooow). It must have been lost in transfers between laptops, so I went to the music store and went through the process of buying it again. In the past when this has happened it has notified me that I already own it and has let me download it again for free. This time however, it said I could download it from iTunes Plus at a discounted price (20p a track), BUT only if I also purchased all the other iTunes Plus tracks it had picked out for me at the same time. So, in order to get the bargain price, I had to spend £3o on tracks that I already owned. Yeah, like I'm going to do that. So for all the fanfare of DRM free music on iTunes plus, it seems to be yet another way of making you pay again for music.

And they wonder why people flock to BitTorrent...

I heart Wordle

Given my fondness for tag clouds, it's inevitable I would love Wordle - it generates word clouds from text you input. Nothing new there, but here's the catch - it's lovely. You can manipulate the text colour, orientation, layout, etc.

I'm not sure tag clouds always add value, but I think we could use them a lot more - for instance at the OU we do a lot of student surveys, often with a free form comment section for students to fill out. As a course team chair I would get back lots of data, plus all of the comments. Wading through these was difficult and time-consuming. A simple tag cloud of student comments would instantly highlight what the main issues were.

Apart from that, I think I am going to refuse to read any report that doesn't start with a nice tag cloud summary.

Here is one from a 30 page SocialLearn report I fed through Wordle. Doesn't tell you much, but is pretty:

LAMS 08 Animoto

Just playing with Animoto - here is a movie from the LAMS conference