The Ed Techie

I wrote that!

Someone has taken some old content I wrote for a course called T171 - You, your computer and the Net, which is available through the openlearn site and put it in Scribd. The course was written in 1998, and at the time hugely successful with 12,000 students. So it was funny to see the old content again. It made me reflect on what it's like to have content take on a life of its own. My old, ownership reaction kicked in initially and I asked myself if I should mind. But that passed immediately, of course I don't mind, as long as readers are aware that it's old stuff and you're not responsible for updating it. Still, I wonder if it will influence the way you write material when you know it may leave home and set up on its own one day.

Not entirely sure I get the point of Scribd I must say - it takes a doc and converts it to a form of PDF that can be embedded in a page. I get the point of doing that with a Powerpoint presentation (as with Slideshare), or with video (as with YouTube), but not really with text. But maybe I'm misssing something, so happy to be enlightened.

Horizontal and vertical social software

I've been having some discussions about Second Life, and firstly wondered why I didn't get it, then noticed that something of a SL backlash was starting. Clay Shirky has a good piece on why we shouldn't get too excited about SL, including the suggestion that SL promotes the old content is king idea (thanks to Adam Joinson for pointing me at this).

I am one of those many people who have tried SL and not got beyond the training island. I wonder why this is so, since I'm not a technophobe. Here are some reasons:

• Time - this is the big one for me, SL like all immersive games just requires a lot of time to get any return on investment. I think I can spend that time more fruitfully.
• So whatism? Someone suggested the other day that we 'could have a meeting in second life'. Yes, we could, but why would we do that, rather than just using FlashMeeting, say. It will take longer to learn, and when we do, it'll be errm, just like real life.
• Nice shiny surface. I think there is a temptation in SL to concentrate on the surface, ie that you are in SL, rather than the content of the interaction. As with above, had we held our meeting in SL we would have spent the whole meeting talking about why X was a seven foot mauve cat and not whatever it was we were supposed to be talking about. Compare that with the very in-depth discussion you get in blogs or discussion forums.
• I just haven't earned it yet, baby (apologies to Smiths fans). It took me several attempts to become a blogger, so maybe I just haven't given SL enough of a try yet and if I stuck with it, I'd want to spend all my time there.
• I'm a grown up/snob. Take your pick, part of me does slightly recoil from the whole role-playing, sci-fi, dungeons and dragons whiff that surrounds it.

As was noted in the recent Oxford survey not that many students were using SL (or the even more fantasy World of Warcraft - I have no desire to be a Draenei alchemist, I am struggling to be a human educational technologist) . But I know some people do really like them, so my theory is that there are horizontal and vertical social software. Horizontal ones are those that have a relatively low threshold to engagement - Flickr, 43Things, Wikipedia, LastFM, delicious, etc are all excellent examples of these. Indeed that has been key to their success - they can utilise the benefits of the network without requiring intensive contributions from all individuals. Even browsing adds to the value of the network. That is not to say that some individuals don't spend a lot of time using them - there are many Flickr addicts out there I'm sure.

And then there are vertical social software, such as SL, WoW, and errrm, some more that I'm sure will come to me. These have a high threshold to participation, and users tend to spend a lot of time engaged with them. The consequence of this is that they need to meet a range of needs, hence SL can be used for work, socialising, shopping, etc. But it means they are unlikely to get the real critical mass required for mass networking seen in the horizontal social software tools. Put simply, I can explain Flickr, YouTube, etc to my dad - he will never get SecondLife.

No surprises for guessing what I think are the more interesting from an educational perspective. I think some very specific uses for SL may be found, in the same way Sim City has been used in some courses, but as a general tool, I'd take most of the horizontal ones any day.

Is marketing dead?

Chris Anderson posted on Google's attitude towards marketing, which was 'we know we're good, everyone will try us so don't do it.' I've been having a few discussions around marketing as part of the broadcast review, and how companies such as YouTube just completely ignore all the rules of marketing. Let's take adverts as the purest form of marketing (I know there are lots of other methods, but they are usually adverts dressed up), I see these as rather greedy chunks of resource. They don't do anything except say 'here I am, this is the product.' And they cost a lot of money to say this. If you take viral marketing in its proper sense, not in the 'marketing companies trying to do normal marketing in a viral way' sense, then it works because the resource does something. It entertains, it educates, it informs, it encourages dialogue, etc. Take YouTube - an advert for the site would be pretty pointless, but allowing people to actually share the content is powerful. A traditional marketing guy would never have understood that.

If one considers this in educational terms then perhaps the best form of marketing universities can do is to create educational content that is freely available. This then serves not one, but three functions:

i) It can be used by the university in its own courses.

ii) It fulfills an outreach/public good function as others can use it.

iii) It advertises the university.

Compare that with simply having an add that says 'gee it's fun to study at X' and I can see a time when traditional marketing begins to look like a shaky investment.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of those in marketing everywhere, I've never really understood it as an academic discipline either. This is after all a field whose Cistine Chapel is Gilette's 'Give away the razor, sell the blades' policy and whose Theory of Relativity is the rebranding of the viscosity of Heinz ketchup. I feel rather like marketing as Galbraith did of economic forecasting when he said "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

Web 2.0 usage at Oxford

Those good people at TALL have done a survey of web 2.0 usage amongst their distance ed students. Dave White blogs about it, with a link to the results. Here are some things I took from it:

• Overall web 2.0 usage isn't as high as you might think given how much some of us talk about it. I don't think this should be that surprising, and before all the naysayers cry 'told you so!' it is worth noting that for some tools it is very high, and it is going to grow rapidly (for example, imagine if this survey had come out a year ago and had included YouTube).
• There is a pretty linear decline in usage across the age ranges (see Figure 3 in the results). Again, not too surprising, but as that youngest group moves up, imagine what the usage will be.
• The big winners in technology terms were wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Skype, instant messaging and blogs. Perhaps surprising amongst the lower end of usage was SecondLife, Social bookmarking and Flickr.
• A lot of the usage is social, with wikipedia probably doing the best for study use. Does this mean they aren't useful in education, or that students haven't made the transfer yet, or that the institution doesn't really provide a route in for them to be used?
• Blogs are pretty well read. I know us bloggers like to think they're the new information source, and it does seem they have really become an established part of people's reading pattern (reinforcing the point I was making in an earlier post). This applied to students and teachers.

Of course there are all sorts of caveats that go with such a survey - how typical are Oxford students, these were distance ed people so how transferable are the results to campus students, etc. But well done to TALL for actually get some data on this, rather than just relying on rhetoric like, ahem, some of us do. It will be interesting to see what will be the big changes in the next couple of years. My guess is you'll see an overall increase as they predict across the board, but there will also be one or two technologies which reach a tipping point. My guess is that SecondLife won't be one of these, because the barrier to entry (in terms of just the amount of time it requires to get a reward) is too high. I think social bookmarking might be one, particularly as it begins to relate to study more.

Things to do in the middle of the night

I woke up with a cough last night and couldn't get back to sleep so came downstairs. While doing some surfing (as an aside to this aside, I never turn the TV on at such times anymore), I accidentally hit the return key after just typing in K in the browser. It took me straight to the wikipedia definition of K. Odd, I thought, so I tried L, and that got the wikipedia definition as well. I wondered if wikipedia had the whole alphabet sewn up, so went through each letter. It seems my initial two hits were just beginner's luck. Most single letters (without the addition of any domain entry e.g. .com) returned Google searches, but a few of them went directly to sites. In case you're interested (and I know you are), the following are the lucky letters:

e http://www.eonline.com/

g google mail

k http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K

l http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L

N http://www.the-n.com/

r http://www.r-project.org/

t http://www.att.com/gen/landing-pages?pid=3308

y http://mail.yahoo.com/

I then wondered why more single letters don't take you to sites, so looked up single letter domain names. It turns out this was something of a hot issue, with six single letter domain names reserved, but apart from that these the internet governing body has reserved the rest under the .com, .net and .org names.  Steve Krause explains http://www.stevekrause.org/steve_krause_blog/2007/02/why_no_singlele.html

This is slightly different, as the ones mentioned above are not the ones reserved, but is based on there being no alternatives for google to find I guess?

Anyway, amazing what you discover at 3am and better than watching the shopping channel surely.

Blogs as organisational dialogue

I know the idea of blogs as the new knowledge management tool isn't new, but it came home to me last week when we (some people from the OU with an interest in broadcasting) had a days workshop with some BBC people. Actually getting together with some of the smart, techie people there was really useful. But, as ever, the problem comes in how to move things forward. It seems clear to me that the  commissioning model that applies to traditional broadcasting doesn't work in the new context. Our overlap was more in areas of R and D than in creating specific programmes.

However, the last thing you want to do is set up some formal meeting structure, whereby we have quarterly meetings which become a chore, and in effect exist for their own function after a while, without getting anything done. What would have been really useful for me was if a few people at the BBC kept regular blogs, which I could subscribe to, and vice versa for them. Even if the blogs aren't aimed directly at us, you would pick up by osmosis what is going on, what the issues are, and who you might be able to collaborate with. Sadly, when I asked if any of them kept blogs I was told no, or if they did they were internal ones.

I had a mild demonstration of this a few days later when I had a call with some consultants who are looking at some of the broadcast issues for the OU. I talked about some e-learning, web 2.0, VLE issues, and then said 'look at my blog, and use the tags to find the relevant stuff.' They called it up while we were chatting and said 'great, we don't need to keep you any longer, we'll come back if we need anything else.'

Increasingly I think these light, by-product methods of exchanging information will be at the heart of the type of partnerships institutions will form. So, if you were looking for a reason to blog, there's another one.

FLOSS summer school

I spent Monday and Tuesday hosting a meeting of the FLOSScom project at Milton Keynes (I always have some sympathy for European partners - while Milton Keynes has its virtues, I'm sure it struggles to compare with Porto or Thessaloniki where our partners are). One of the deliverables (in EU project speak 'workpackages') is a summer school which both aims to demonstrate the principles of how learning in open source communities occurs and also to be about these communities, ie it is FLOSS in both subject and process.

One of the differences between FLOSS projects and much of education is that in FLOSS you have a definite project that you sign up for. In education you may not know what it is you want to work towards, because you don't know what you don't know. This is rather akin to Socrates Meno's paradox which goes something like 'how can I inquire about something which I don't know anything about?' In our form it is something like how can I sign up for a project when I don't know what it is I need to know.' Anyway, our proposal is that in the summer school the learners (who will ideally be both experienced FLOSS members and novices) will create a course, which is analagous to the software project in the open source world.

BBC Jam: Too successful for their own good

I spent yesterday in a meeting with the BBC where we were discussing changes to both the OU and the BBC brought about by the internet. It was very interesting, but also really challenging as there seem to be fundamental changes required to how both organisations operate.

And then today I hear that BBC Jam, an online educational service for 5- 16 year olds, has been suspended. It has been suspended not because it was a failure or through lack of interest, but because several commercial companies complained that it was harming their business. So rather than have to respond with a better product, they simply get the site shut down. Could newspapers get the BBC or Guardian online shut down because it harms their business? Could e-learning companies complain that OpenLearn damages their profits? The response should be 'well of course it harms your business, because your business is changing.'

This demonstrates two things: i) many commercial companies still don't get the new economics of the net and ii) the blurring of the 'broadcast' boundary will cause friction in other sectors. Trying to draw a maginot line that confines the activity of traditional broadcasters to just television is both pointless and damaging to them ie., about much use as the original Maginot line.

My Amazon ranking - whipped by the long tail

Looking at your books ranking in Amazon can be a mildly obsessive pastime, like checking your Technorati rating (465,937 since you ask). In Amazon yesterday I had risen to the giddy heights of 9,432. To put that in context Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is 97, Moby Dick is 1,428 and Perec's Life A User Manual is 639,483.

But before I could purchase the yacht, it seems my fantasies of retirement were scuppered by the long tail. Sales fall off very quickly after the first 1000 or so, as this article explains. So at around 10,000 it is selling 11 copies every 5 days. It'd have to be a pretty small yacht under those circumstances. And this seems to have been a peak (probably a couple of friends bought a copy out of pity), as today I am at 63,108. Of course it would be a very sad person indeed who looked up how the books of their colleagues were doing, so you won't catch me doing that, oh no.

(Thanks to Chris Pegler for the link).

Some long tail in education thoughts

The Long Tail concept crops up in a few things I am working on, such as the broadcast strategy, and web 2.0 approaches to content, so here are some thoughts on what it means in education (primarily distance and e-learning).

• New course economics. If the blockbuster is dead (or at least not as significant as it was), then the Fordist model of distance education course production needs revising. There has been talk of a post-Fordist model for a long time, but I think we haven't really changed the model fundamentally. In a long tail world lots of small population courses might be the way to go, which means the economics of course production and presentation need to change, for example to a more flexible model built around aggregation.
• Specific is better than popular. If you use a site built on recommendations, data mining and networking, for example LastFM or Amazon, then the less popular searches generate much more useful connections. Popular titles don't generate hits that are relevant to you because the people who buy/rate them like a wide variety of stuff, and because the popular titles might not be that representative of your tastes. And so it would be in learning, for example 'Evolution' won't get you far as a search term, but 'language evolution' will be better, and 'language evolution in primates' might be better still. In education terms then the question is how the learner is helped/scaffolded to get to the stage when they can start finding valuable resources, and then the framework within which those resources make sense.
• It strengthens the case for personalisation. In a world where I have my own personal radio or TV station the expectation of having material that I select is raised. Being provided with one set of resources only which may not suit my needs or preferences will seem increasingly stifling. Although this will still need to address many of the issues around personalisation in education, such as what it does to the cohort and how do you assess it, but it's another nail in the one-size-fits-all coffin.
• Course design is about aggregation and activity. In a long tail world the educator can aggregate a wide variety of very specific content together easily enough. The content itself is only half the story though and what matters is the (dare I say it) learning design. Pre-long tail the content itself was more significant because it carried the information to everyone. So this is where the effort went, which meant that a lot of pedagogy didn't go much beyond 'read this - now discuss it.' But if you are drawing on a wide range of content then the effort goes in to creating, and supporting, activities around that content.
• Uniformity is not important, diversity is the norm. When creating courses there is often a temptation to write everything yourself, to provide a uniform voice. The idea is that it helps the student to have a consistent tone. But, building on the previous point, this consistency is provided by the support. In the long tail world the user is accustomed to a diversity of resources as they seek out ones that suit them rather than just accepting the popular choices.