The Ed Techie

Why write books?

I reflected on being a blogger recently, and one might ask yourself, why blog? Chuck Olsen's blogumentary gives some pretty good reasons. Having just had my second book come out, perhaps the question  now is why write a book? After all, it takes ages, it's out of date before it's printed, it exists largely in isolation compared with all the blogs, wikis, social software. And so on.

Here are some possible reasons:

i) Money - you're joking, right? Maybe for the Dan Browns of the world, but the return on investment for most academic books operates somewhere between 1/10th and roughly equal to minimum wage. I remember doing some consultancy after my first book had been published. In two days I earned more than the book had brought in over the year, and it had taken seven months to write.

ii) Bibliophilia - or at least something to do with the physicality of books. To paraphrase Johnny Thunders, you can't put your arms around a blog. Society has elevated books to items of worship also, despite the crappy footballer biographies, the plethora of chick lit, the endless stream of Da Vinci code copies, etc, we still revere books.

iii) Reputation and status - now we're getting nearer to it I think. Following on from above, anyone can write a blog (democratisation is after all one of their big claims) but writing books is still reasonably uncommon. Most of the parents of my daughters classmates earn more than me, live in bigger houses and drive Mercedes, but I always have the trump card of 'I've written books' up my sleeve. Of course, it never quites comes down to such blatant competition, but there is an element of ego in writing a book. Which is ironic really, since blogs are often decried for being all about self-publicity.

iv) Creative impulse - there is something in this, the frustrated novelist and all that. But being a blog writer does fulfill this function to an extent, although there is something about having the extended time and space to explore ideas over 80,000 words.

v) Knowledge transfer - hmmm, I could play the altruistic card and pretend I am doing it solely to add to the sum of human knowledge, but a book isn't necessarily the best medium for this now. There was a time when that would have washed, but a blog or website would be as good a means now. I do think there is some good interplay between the two media though - you read a good book on the train and then find the author's blog for more regular thoughts.

vi) Cognitive housekeeping - writing a book (and reading one) is a good means of wrapping up a subject, drawing a line under it and putting in a drawer. A good book on a subject acts as kind of shorthand for a lot of issues. For instance, you can say to a group of knowledgeable people 'it's a long tail kind of thing', and be understood.

There are probably some more reasons, but that's my lot for now. Not a particularly compelling list is it. Would I write another one? You bet!

My book is (finally) out

With definitely more of a whimper than a bang, my book Virtual Learning Environments, was published by Routledge last week. I'd contacted them the week before and asked 'when is it coming out?' 'Next week' was the response.

Anyway, it was good to receive the advance copies last week, although I made the mistake of reading it and immediately finding a second book of omissions, changes, changes of mind, etc lurking beneath the surface of this one. Perhaps I'll write a post on things I should have covered in a few months time.

The book is aimed at a range of users - anyone involved in e-learing basically. It will be interesting to see whether it meets the needs of the techies, the educator who is tentatively using their VLE, and the manager choosing their institutional VLE.

Stringle implications

The last in this trilogy of posts...

Several things occurred to me when playing with Stringle yesterday. I'll try to elucidate them here:

Course design - increasingly I feel that writing course resources is a redundant activity. I think course design will move towards creating activities around as yet unknown content. For instance, we added in a feed for any content that is tagged elearning and evolution. Now it's a reasonable bet that this will contain some decent (and not so decent material). But it helps future-proof the course. I don't think you could quite rely on such resources but the ratio of educator derived material to external resources is surely going to decrease.

Why does HE develop tools - I know, I've commented on this before, but looking at the range of tools that are just out there, and the ease with which you can pull them in to a system made me wonder it all over again. I would like to propose Weller's rule of educational software development which goes something like 'if an educational establishment wants to develop a tool then by the time it has reached the functional requirements stage a better one will be freely available'. Allright, it's not a snappy one, but you get the idea.

PLEs are possible - I've been a bit of a critic of PLEs, partly because they seemed obsessed with clients and partly because they underestimated some of the challenges I felt. But I can see how a mid-ground between the 'it's all down to the user' and 'central control' models could be found, by providing default tools, and allowing users to pull in their preferred ones if they wish.

Openness is the new king - if the struggle to get Vista shipped hadn't convinced me that the proprietary model of software development was dead, then this has. I kept thinking of the time I had spent getting a course ready for the UK e-university, who spent somewhere between 10 and 18 million pounds on developing a VLE. It wasn't very good. Imagine what you could do with something like a Stringle approach for a tenth (even a hundredth) of that money.

Anyway that's enough on Stringle.

Stringle 2.0

Having shown you Stringle, I thought it'd be interesting to think what else it would need to be a usable tool.

Here's my thoughts:

Tools –

A good range of tools that users can select from. Tony's working on this, so you should have a range to select from and can simply drag them into your toolset and give them a label (thus avoiding all that del.icio.us and URL stuff).

Easy way of adding new tool - if you come across a tool then you want to be able to add it simply by clicking a button. If we were providing students with a university social bookmarking tool, then this could be done easily.

Toolset related to resource - I think this would be quite powerful. If you select a particular tool then it has some metadata associated with it which automatically loads in the appropriate tool(s). Thus if you're doing a timeline activity the only tool available is a timeline, if you're doing a collaborative activity then maybe a discussion board and IM tool are displayed.

Content

Easy add - as with tools, you don't really want people to mess around with OPML managers, so you need a neat way of adding content in.

Icons - next to the links in the grazr widget it would be good if you can identify different types of resources, e.g. activities had an icon or were styled a particular way.

Enterprise -

Authentication - you're going to need some way of allocating roles and resources to individuals, which means all the tedious but mission critical stuff around linking with student record systems, assigning roles, security, etc.

Tracking - this is essentially dumb integration. If you really want to do tracking you need to know what people are doing in each of the tools. This might be insoluble if you want to allow an open system.

Usability - it's no oil painting at the moment and definitely could benefit from some good interface design.

Of course, you may be asking yourself 'why bother? Why not just use Pageflakes?' (or something similar). There may be something in this, but what impresses me is the way a system can be configured quite easily. More on this in the next post.

Stringle - almost a web 2.0 PLE?

Tony Hirst visited me yesterday in Cardiff and we spent the day going through his String n Glue VLE (Stringle). I'll split up my posts on this, so in this one I'll do a quick users guide, then I'll look at what else it needs in another post, and finally some thoughts.

Before we get stuck in I ought to just say that there is a bit of clunkiness about this, and the immediate reaction might be 'most students are not going to do this.' Which is true, but a lot of this clunkiness could be removed with a bit of resource and programming (e.g. creating a button that automatically adds a resource). I'll come back to this in the next post, but for now, assume it could all be made easy.

You will need a del.icio.us account and an OPML manager (e.g. from http://www.opmlmanager.com/) in place before you start.

Go to Stringle at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php

You'll see a list of tools across the top like Docs, whiteboard, etc. Clicking one of these will load the tool in to the Tools tab in the central frame.

One the left there is a list of content. Clicking on one of these will open the content in the Web tab in the centre (or you can add in a URL in the box at the top and it will display it).

And that is essentially it - you have your tools at the top and your content down the side. Both are configurable, so let's start with the tools.

Say I want to add in a scheduler tool, like Remember The Milk. You need to bookmark the site using del.icio.us (any social bookmarking tool could be used but for demo Tony has opted for the best known one). You need to tell Stringle it is a tool, and to do this you use the tag stringle:tool You can create clusters or categories of tools, which you can load in to Stringle at different times. So for example you might have a collection of collaborative tools. Lets say I group my Todo tool in with admin tools. I would then add in the del.icio.us tag by leaving a space and adding 'admin'. Now I want to tell it what text to put along the top in Stringle, so I add another tag, say 'stringle:Milk'.

Now I want to load my admin tools in to Stringle. To do this I add in some text after the URL - ?t=del.icio.us name/category name. So in my case I would add in ?t=mjweller/admin to give the url http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php?t=mjweller/admin

Okay I said it got a bit clunky, but this could all be automated. Now let's add some content in to the left hand panel, which comes courtesy of Grazr. To do this you'll need to go to your OPML manager. If you are in OPMLManager, then right click on the main folder and create a sub-folder. Let's say I'm creating a course on Evolution, so I'll add in a folder with this name. As I discover different resources I can add them in here using the add link function. These can be sites, rss feeds, podcasts, etc.

Once you've built up your collection of resources, you want to import it in to Stringle. This requires URL jiggery-pokery again. This time add ?oURL for OPML feed so in my case it would be ?o=http://www.opmlmanager.com/opml/mweller.opml giving the URL http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php?o=http://www.opmlmanager.com/opml/mweller

Now we can of course combine the two to give my toolset and my content -

http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php?o=http://www.opmlmanager.com/opml/mweller.opml&t=mjweller/admin

It may be a bit buggy still (especially in IE Tony tells me), but you get the idea. That's the boring stuff, I'll look at what else could be done to it in another post.

My own blogging milestone

This is my 100th post, which I think means I can now officially call myself a blogger. I tried unsuccessfully to keep a blog several times before, so thought I'd reflect on why I had managed it this time. This is emphatically not a 'guide to becoming a blogger' since I don't think one person can tell someone else how to do that. Just my thoughts on my experience:

Firstly, I narrowed the focus. Previously I had tried to be a blogger for all people, but I found it necessary to have a specific subject area, in my case educational technology and e-learning. With this acting as a spine I could branch of occasionally in to other subjects (witness ramblings on football), but generally I found it easier to use this as a basis.

Secondly, I found an appropriate tone. I had struggled before with how to comment on, say, meetings I had been in. While 'X was their usual curmudgeonly self' may be true it is both libellous and not very interesting to others. So I tend to use the meetings as springboards for more general points.

Thirdly, I built up some momentum before I let people know about it. This was helped by writing a book at the time, so I had lots to say and time to say it.

Lastly, I began to think about everyday experiences in terms of blog postings. This can become quite obsessive. I sometimes feel like the character in 'The Grand Complication' who compulsively 'girdles' everything. Sitting in conferences I would consider what my posting would be, as a way of passing the time. Actually, thinking about postings is a very good means of engaging with the world on an analytical level. It makes you consider what the essence of the situation is, and how it relates to your personal experience and broader issues.

Looking forward, I wonder to what extent blogging will become an integral part of one's career profile. Just as some academics are essentially professional journal article writers, will some become predominantly bloggers. Blogging was something that I did in the occasional spare moment, but increasingly I feel it is central to what I do (if my boss is reading this - I still do lots of other stuff as well!).

My own leisure snobbery

Over the weekend I was forced to confront my own snobbery about what is a good use of leisure time. As I mentioned, we have a Nintendo Wii, and given the adverse weather at the weekend (overseas readers - it snowed in the UK, causing national hysteria), we stayed in quite a bit. My daughter played with the Wii for a while, and then I asked her to stop and switch to board games (which she did happily enough). It made me think about why I have a mental equation which goes something like 'computer games = mildly bad, board games = good'. Why did I feel that the computer games needed to be rationed in some way? I accept the claim about sedentary lifestyles and obesity (although anyone who thinks a Wii is sedentary has never played one, I am currently suffering from 'wii shoulder' brought on by some over-energetic stretching during a tennis match), but given that my daughter does ballet, horse-riding, gymnastics, swimming as well as playing a lot with her peers, she is far from sedentary. And board games are hardly active, yet they don't come in for the criticism computer games receive. No, it's more about other pursuits being deemed more worthy.

As many have pointed out, including Steven Johnson (who has also blogged about the Wii) in 'Everything Bad is Good for you', there are a lot of intellectual and social benefits to computer games. I'm probably the last generation to have this snobbery (I wonder what my daughter will be snobbish about? She'll probably tell her children to stop confusing the android and go and play some virtual reality games). I remember being admonished by my parents for reading too much as a child, so maybe it's just the old parental adage that whatever you're doing you should be doing something else.

RSS as universal acid - revisited

I blogged before about RSS becoming the universal acid or lingua franca of web 2.0. Yahoo have just released the beta of their pipes, which is a way of remixing feeds and creating mash-ups without getting too dirty in the programming. With his talent for understatement Tim O'Reilly says it is "a milestone in the history of the internet."

Tony Hirst has had a go creating a pipe for the openlearn content, and seems to like using them.

I'm not quite as convinced that they are a) as easy to use as people think (what techies think is easy is not the same as the rest of us) and b) they will have quite the impact suggested. However, I do think they mark another step in the RSS march to domination, and that is what will be interesting. When RSS is the standard format for all content, then aggregating it, sharing it and reusing it become standard practice. If one thinks of all content like this then the idea of creating static stuff locked away in a VLE seems at odds with the rest of the world, and rather uninspiring.

With my learning design hat on, I also wondered whether the pipes interface might be combined with something like LAMS to produce a powerful means of mixing content and activity.

10 things to unlearn

A nice piece from Will Richardson on 10 Things educators need to unlearn. There's a bit of rhetoric about it, and sure it hides a wealth of complications, but if I worked in a strategy unit of a university or major corporation, I'd be asking myself 'what would education look like if we tried to address these 10 issues?' If we take just one of these e.g. "We need to unlearn the practice that teaches all students at the same pace. Is it any wonder why so many of our students love to play online games where they move forward at their own pace?" then that would have significant implications for how we structure education - it might lead to more e-learning for one, with user determined pacing, subscription models of content, changes in assessment practice, changes in the academic year (a semester doesn't make much sense in a self-paced world), as well as possible negatives such as difficulties in establishing groupwork, loss of identity with the immediate cohort (although a wider one could be established), etc.

I think it is the wider ramifications of these changes that makes educational practice so resistant to change. I was discussing personalisation with someone the other day, and when we began to unpick it there were drastic changes required to how academics operate, what students do, how universities are funded, and so on. Within 10 minutes we felt the need to create a whole new educational structure, and that's a bit much, so rather like naughty children who had unwrapped a Christmas present early, we packaged it back up as best we could and thought 'best leave it alone.'

So while you might agree with a lot of Will's 10 items (and I do), the tricky part is then translating them in to small, practical steps. This delivering is often undervalued in higher education (I know, I've made a career out of almost delivering). Steve Jobs, back when he was leading the Mac development team and before he became a professional messiah, used to have a mantra 'real artists ship.' Perhaps we should adopt that in education: 'Real educators deliver' (this would then be followed by a 100 page treatise on what constituted 'real', 'educators' and 'deliver').

I afford a Wii

We bought a Nintendo Wii last weekend. I've not been in to games that much before - my gaming days ended around the time of Doom/Duke Nuke 'em (now those were some games). My main problem with games is that they just take so much time to get any return on. I really don't have 50 hours to give over to battling aliens, and if I did then I experience a form of leisure angst - there are those unread volumes of Proust on my bookshelf that I really should get around to, or there is a five mile run I need to do today, or some craft activity I should be sharing with my daughter.

I am very much in the target audience for the Wii then - a game console for people who don't usually buy game consoles. It's mildly depressing to realise how well targeted you are, because the Wii is exactly right for me! You can pick it up and play immediately, the games can be much shorter and it doesn't require a big commitment to get any return from.

It's a big hit with the family too - my daughter has repeatedly knocked me out in boxing. Now I would be remiss in my academic duty if I didn't mention affordances here. The Wii is a model of affordance for interaction - watching my daughter struggle with a PS2 controller compared with the ease with which she took to the Wii could be a case study in interface and object design. I should probably try and find some educational uses for it, but that isn't what it's for - its affordance is fun.