The Ed Techie

The real reason behind that Cisco lawsuit

So Cisco are suing Apple for the use of the iphone name. I heard this numerous times today and my initial reaction was 'how could Apple have been so dumb?' But then I noticed that every news report seemed contractually obliged to mention that the iphone 'which Apple describe as magical', was a really cool product - and who are this Cisco bunch anyway?

And then idiots like me blog about it - in this day alone Apple have recouped more in advertising and blogosphere chat than any lawsuit will cost them. When you're Steve Jobs and you have cool looking gadgets, all publicity really is good publicity.

On the subject of the phone itself I'm not convinced by the pricing - it costs an absolute fortune and then they tie you in with only one provider (at the moment in the US that is what is planned anyway). This is Apple's old closed world view in play again - they may be the last great proprietary company. Ironically, given their foundations, they resemble IBM more every day - I think in many years to come we will view them both as one of the same kind. In much the same way that we no longer view Hard Times as an historical novel from Dickens, but just a Dickens novel, the gap between the two is lost when viewed from a decent time lapse.

Academici.net

I guess it was a result of my post about an academic LinkedIn, I got invited to join Academici.net. It seems to be what I was talking about (I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't know about it), so I created a profile. While it is definitely more academic focused than LinkedIn, I still felt that it was a bit oriented towards getting a new job, and not so much around creating joint research proposals, or collaborative articles, or visiting fellowships, say.

It has a good feature set - to quote from the email:

An on-line journal to publish abstracts, drafts, papers or upload any kind of documents and the option to share them with contacts or keep them private through your privacy settings.

The ability to add your own personal bookmarks and share them with your contacts!

The ability to participate on the message boards plus your own private message board.

A personalized central message board to follow your favorite conversations across the network.

A tribute section - a support for the next career move.

Easy search functionality to quickly find people with similar interests or backgrounds.

However I felt there could be a bit more 2.0 in there, it could be a bit, well, cooler. Take a look at the Nike+ site for instance (for creating a runner's profile using the Nike+ iTunes combination). It has very good personal tools (you upload all your runs, it gives you analysis, playlists, so on). But it also has good community tools, for instance you can set a goal such as 'Run 100 miles' and others can join that goal, a la 43Things. Academici.net could do with a bit of this, e.g. 'I'm interested in creating a Framework 7 proposal on web 2.0 technologies'. You can kind of do this in the forums, but I think it could be made more accessible - the forums approach feels a bit old school VLE.

Limewire and iTunes talking behind my back

I thought I'd have a play with Limewire (while respecting copyright laws naturally), so downloaded it onto one laptop. For those who haven't played with it, Limewire creates a folder for shared files, which you download to and share with others (it also offers to search your hard disk for any media files to search, which is a bit of a security nightmare, so I declined).

While I wait for my Toshiba to be mended, I have put iTunes and all my music on another old, laptop. When I started this up iTunes created a menu item for my shared Limewire folder, which was on a different computer. This puzzled, concerned and delighted me simultaneously. While not wanting to resort to computer anthropomorphism, I was left asking 'how does it know?' I didn't give Limewire my itunes id, or vice versa.

The answer is probably obvious to everyone else, but it took me a while to figure it out - it is because they are both on the same wireless network in my home, so iTunes searches for any other DAAP software and automatically integrates it. I thought this was neat, but it made me kind of nervous in two ways: i) what other info was being accessed and by who, and ii) it has kind of Forbin Project overtones with computers talking to each other without need for me. What else are they doing together?

The pointlessness of plagiarism detection

Today I was invited to sit on an e-cheating panel at the Web Based Education 2007 conference in Chamonix. Unfortunately I can't make it, but it prompted me to consider the whole plagiarism issue. This was something I had to wrestle with a good deal when I chaired T171 You, your computer and the Net back in 1999. We had 12,000 students, so trying to find a plagiarism proof assessment method was a priority. This was back in the early days of e-learning and there were lots of people waiting to see it fail. Rather like distance education in its early days, e-learning suffered from a legitimacy deficit, so it had to work extra hard to prove its credentials.

It was all a bit Lewis and Clark at the time so we took a joing approach of designing assessment that was less plagiarisable and also putting in place human detection systems (the plagiarism detection tools were just starting then). The latter was surprisingly effective - usually the writing style changes dramatically (I would just avoid saying 'improves') and putting a suspect phrase in to Google was usually sufficient to uncover the source.

The plagiarism detection and provision services have since entered in to the kind of arms race we see with viruses and anti-virus software (indeed one could see plagiarism as an assessment virus). It isn't really a field I have kept up with to a great extent, particularly as I now chair a postgrad course where the numbers are much lower, the assessment more varied and the likelihood of cheating much lower.

My feeling though is that plagiarism is a symptom of old-fashioned assessment techniques, and to put effort in to plagiarism detection is to miss the point. What a plagiarism susceptible system reveals is an unhealthy emphasis on content and an old-fashioned worldview. If you assume that all content is freely available (not necessarily true, but let's go with it as a starting point), then if you ask students to create content then of course they're going to lift bits from various sources, whether intentionally or unintentionally. There is an argument that the assessment method is going contrary to the connectedness of the modern world here, although acknowledging others is always good practice. But my point is that if we took this as a base assumption we would devise different assessment methods. There is nothing about the conventional exam or essay that is an absolute measure of academic quality - in fact you can view these as administrative conveniences based on the face to face, physical constraints of education. Finding ways of perpetuating them by 'catching' plagiarism to me just demonstrates a lack of imagination.

When internet shopping goes bad

As I am normally an enthusiast for doing everything online, I ought to report when it doesn't work out quite as planned. For Christmas I bought my wife a Nano (yes, despite the fact that the last one corrupted, and that I have all those DRM and performance issues with iTunes, it is still cool looking and good for running). I ordered online a week before Christmas, and paid for next day delivery via City-Link. Sadly these turned out to be something of a keystone cops delivery firm. It was despatched on Monday, for delivery on Tuesday. I checked the tracking website and it was loaded on to a van at 6.30am. The day passed and it didn't arrive.

I checked the website again the next day, and it had been loaded on at 5.30 this time. At 3pm I became nervous and spent half an hour queuing on the phone to be told 'it's on the van, it'll definitely be with you by 5.30'. Naturally 5.30 came and went with no sign of my parcel. I began to get anxious about the approaching big day now. I rang again and was assured that it would be made a priority for the next day.

Thursday was spent waiting, telephoning, waiting, but alas, no amount of pacing up and down or swearing could summon the God of parcel delivery to have mercy on me. I now had the most travelled parcel in Cardiff, as everyday I merrily tracked its progress around the city (I had an image of it sitting on an open top bus, being driven past the stadium). I began to worry about its carbon footprint. I was wondering if a picture of a nano would suffice for Christmas morning.

The next day I resorted to repeated phone calls and was eventually rewarded with one of the operators promising to speak to her friend whose boyfriend was driving the van. Strangely, this unorthodox method of systems control worked and the package eventually arrived.

What the whole fiasco reminded me of was the early days of e-commerce, when the logistics still needed to be worked through. This was particularly true in grocery shopping. I remember a number of online grocery start-ups who tried to fill the vacuum created by the sluggishness of the major supermarkets. Unfortunately these firms lacked the infrastructure of the big firms which was particularly problematic when it came to delivery times - you might be able to have a book delivered at any time, but you can't have ice-cream sitting on your porch all day. This led to some convoluted solutions, for instance one firm provided customers with an external food locker where they could store the shopping. This was never going to catch on, let's face it, and only when the Tescos and Sainsbury's of the world moved in did the simplicity of choosing a delivery slot make sense.

The moral is that it's the boring, logistical stuff that makes a good idea succeed, I guess.