The Ed Techie

My first slidecast

As part of the broadcast strategy review at the OU, I wanted to show the different types of outputs that academics can produce which might be considered broadcast in some sense. One of these is slidecasting (the combination of powerpoint and audio). I upload my powerpoint files to Slideshare regularly, so thought I'd try adding the audio to one too.

It's a bit fiddly - you have to upload the audio to a different site, as Slideshare don't host it (yet). Synching the audio with slides took a bit of getting used to (I even had to look at the help splashcast), but once I had the hang of it, was pretty smooth and easy to use.

I chose the blogging workshop I did a while ago with Tony Hirst. Be warned, as I've said before, I have an ideal voice for mime. Listening to yourself is tough (I ran the Bristol Half Marathon on Sunday, and if you think listening to yourself is deflating, try seeing photos of yourself running), I um, err and smack my lips like Cliff Richard quite a bit, but it's usable. So, here it is, enjoy!

FB - It can't be private and not a walled garden

(Warning - this post contains some dangerously stretched garden metaphors).

There have been lots of mutterings about Facebook being a walled garden recently, for instance danah boyd ponders

I am utterly confused by the ways in which the tech industry fetishizes Facebook. There's no doubt that Facebook's F8 launch was *brilliant*. Offering APIs and the possibility of monetization is a Web 2.0 developer's wet dream. (Never mind that I don't know of anyone really making money off of Facebook aside from the Poker App guy.) But what I don't understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here? Why is the tech crowd so entranced with Facebook?

In July Jason Kottke compared FB with AOL and complained that

"Google doesn't index any user-created information on Facebook. AFAIK, user data is available through the platform but that hardly makes it open...all of the significant information and, more importantly, interaction still happens in private. Compare this with MySpace or Flickr or YouTube. Much of the information generated on these sites is publicly available. The pages are indexed by search engines."

Now of course FB has announced that it will make some data available for Google to search. So everyone's happy now, right? Wrong. Now FB are trampling over privacy. For instance Om Malik fears that

this is yet another small step in the overall erosion of personal privacy, thanks to the ever growing popularity of the social networks. I don’t like the direction where all this is headed. ...We are slowly leaving digital litter all over the web, and some day it is going to cause problems.

And danah boyd continues to be puzzled when she says

"Still, I can't wait to see how a generation of college students feel about their FB profile appearing at the top of Google searches. That outta make them feel good about socializing there. Not."

So firstly, FB is bad for being a walled garden, then pilloried for opening up a bit. Let's get some of the privacy concerns in perspective - it will reveal your name, and a thumbnail. Not your status, your photos, your applications, etc. That doesn't strike me as a massive invasion of privacy, you could pretty much find that out anywhere else (you can see mine - I've found my way to the privacy settings, but figured this is okay). And if I really was worried about someone tracking me down, I probably wouldn't be on FB (or MySpace, or FriendsReunited, or LinkedIn). I think FB will have some tricky privacy issues to deal with, but it already has quite fine-grained controls, the trick will be in getting people to use them. As I've said before I think multiple profiles from the same core identity will be the way to go.

As for the initial walled garden accusation, that is true to an extent, although with the opening up of its API it is a long way from the AOL days. But it is a walled garden in that the data goes in and doesn't come out. That is partly a privacy thing, but mainly a building stickability policy. I am in general in favour of open systems, and syndication over stickability, but I think we're all prepared to accept one or two sites in our lives that add enough value to sacrifice this for.

So, at the moment FB is a walled garden, but it's a nice walled garden, that's why we go there. The rest of the time we like playing down the park with our mates, where we can meet new people, share ice-creams, play football, etc. But occassionally we get fed up with the dog poo that litters the place and retreat to our walled garden with just our invited friends for a nice picnic.

For those puzzled by FB's success they should probably look at what machine they are using to write these calls for openness on - it'll usually be a Mac. Ask themselves why they use such a closed system machine, and the answer will probably be 'because it's good.'

Apple used to be so open...

 

I'm reading 'Founders at Work' at the moment (quite an interesting read, I'll probably summarise the key issues in a later post). I know (or knew anyway) a lot about the start of the computer industry, having created a course on it, so I was more interested in the net start ups. But there is an interview with Steve Wozniak in there, in which he says of the Apple II (my italics)

"It was just open to all these things. We made it easy for anyone to do what they wanted to do. And I think that was one of the biggest keys to its success. We didn't make it a hidden machine that we own...

We put out manuals that had just hundreds of pages of listings of code, descriptions of circuits, examples of boards that you would plug in - so that anyone could look at this and say 'Now I know how I would do my own.' ... So one of our big keys to success was that we were very open. There's a big world out there for other people to come and join us."

Now fast forward 28 years or so and you'd struggle to say that about a single Apple product now wouldn't you? For instance, Ray Corrigan has a post of Apple's latest round of digital locks, including the iPhone ring tunes eraser. None of this follows from Wozniak's description above, so how did a company so open become one so closed?

NYT enters education market, and the changing nature of newspapers

The New York Times has announced an inititiative that will provide content and social networking to students and educators. They claim it is

"a new online initiative that pairs Times content with faculty course material for both credit-bearing and continuing education courses. Educators will now have the opportunity to select Times articles, archival content, graphics and multimedia content, including videos and Webcasts, gathered around specific subjects, and make them available to students online, along with other course materials"

Perhaps more interestingly they edge towards a 'Facebook for learning' when they propose

"In addition to enhanced course offerings for college students and lifelong learners, the Knowledge Network will serve as a global networking and professional and academic development resource for faculty, students and alumnae. Users will be able to share work with colleagues, create their own academic or professional ePortfolios (digital repositories of a person's work), invite peer review and establish professional contact with people around the globe based on common academic pursuits and research."

At the moment it is all based around their own system (they are partnering with Epsilen) so it feels like another publisher saying 'come to our system', so I'm not sure how open it is. For instance can you pull RSS feeds into your system, can you add applications to it, etc.

This is not particularly new - a number of publishers have done similar things. But it does further demonstrate the convergence of industries, and the increased erosion of the educational monopoly enjoyed by universities. At the moment they are selling it as a service that educators can use, but if we look at that second quote, it doesn't take a massive leap of imagination to see other providers offering accreditation and freelance tuition in such a marketplace.

The other reason people will find for dismissing it is the traditional divide between 'journalistic' and 'academic' content. While there is some truth in this, it is a division that is becoming less binary, and increasingly fuzzy. This is partly because being online removes many of the constraints that forced newspapers to produce journalistic material in the first place. These include:

• Space - in the physical format space is at a premium, thus any extended interview, analysis or commentary is usually cut to fit the page and allow for a last minute advert. This is one of the common complaints of both journalists and their interviewees. Online there is no such restriction, so you can have a brief, 'traditional' piece, but also a much longer version.
• Audience - a newspaper has to aim at a general audience, and thus is often accused of dumbing down. Again this need not be the case online, because you can reach a global audience, not a national or regional one. Therefore what would be a small interest piece in your printed version can have a sufficiently long tail with a global audience. And, if space doesn't cost, then why not publish it?
• Format - the newspaper is restricted to print and the odd photograph, although as noted, the exact size and quantity of both elements will be determined by its physical limitations. Online of course there is the freedom to have different media types: audio, video, animation. But perhaps more significantly there is the freedom to play around with the format of these media types - you can have blogs which have a different feel from an official article, or podcasts, or online debates, etc. This allows the format to suit the subject, not the subject to be manipulated to fit the confines of the format.
• The journalistic filter - when a newspaper was purely a physical object then the process of producing an article with all of the above limitations acted as a filter. It required specialist knowledge, which was embodied in the journalist. This person didn't have specialist knowledge of the subject area they were writing about (although they are often broad subject area specialists, e.g technology writers), but they did know about the process of creating newspaper copy. When the limitations are removed, so is the need for much of this expertise. We are all journalists now. This means that a lot of material doesn't need to go through the filter of the journalist, a process which is subject to misinterpretation, bias, editing, and mistakes, but instead can come from the expert themselves. Admittedly not all experts are good writers, but the process of disintermediation has commenced.

And in education the same process is happening in reverse. There the academic article was the unit of thought currency, but this was also largely determined by physical limitations. Online we are finding that the blog posting, and perhaps more significantly the distributed debate, is often more informative.

The upshot of all this is that those of us in education shouldn't be sniffy about journalistic content - it'll be knocking on your lecture hall door any time now.

(Thanks to Tony for the link)

Another blog mentee

As I mentioned before I've offered to mentor some nascent OU bloggers. Patrick McAndrew was first (I'm being lenient on him as he's been on holiday, but now we start!). Next up is Will Woods. This is just by way of shaming them in to action.

And following on from my previous post, while I'm on a Scoble love-in here is an excellent slideshow on creating a killer blog from him and Maryam (it's nearly a year old now, but still a goodie), which I sent to Will and Patrick as starting advice.

This week's blog sport - Scoble bashing

Now if there's one person who doesn't need my support it's Scoble, as Kathy Sierra has said 'Scoble can handle it.' But this week's attacks on Scoble have been interesting to watch since they say both good and bad things about the blogosphere.

Firstly, Scoble's crime for those who don't know, was to post a video where he argued that "Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook are going to kick Google's butt in four years". From what I can understand he is just plain wrong in some of the statements he makes (Danny Sullivan has a detailed long post on what's wrong with his argument - he's right, but he's angry!). Secondly, he allowed his enthusiasm to be used as a marketing tool for Mahalo.

The response was quite vitriolic. If you don't know much about search engines the level of rancour might strike you as slightly out of perspective, but software does that to people. Here are some of the responses:

• Adario Strange of Wired
• Stowe Boyd
• Valleywag

There is a barely concealed element of schadenfreude here - Scoble is prominent, a blatant self-publicist and makes bold statements (and he worked for Microsoft). People have been waiting for him to trip up, and have jumped on it when he has. I confess, I like Scoble - I often disagree with him, but he provides insight into a lot of the tech companies, has strong opinions, is often insightful and (not to be underestimated) has a sense of humour. Scoble's reaction has been interesting too - he listed most of the negative reactions, argued against some of them, and then admitted he had made mistakes.

The episode highlighted a few things to me:

i) Although there was a lot of vitriol in the responses, there was also a lot of considered thought and argument. It may be robust and confrontational at times, but this type of debate is what the blogosphere is about.

ii) Look how quickly the whole thing was raised, debated, assessed and then resolved. Less than a week. Academic publishing would still be reviewing the first article. It might not publish it on the grounds that Scoble was wrong, but that would remove a lot of the interesting debate from the public domain. I never knew I wanted to know about the particular workings of different search engines, but it turns out I did!

iii) I haven't tried Mahalo, but I have installed Ligit, and it seems to me that the  core of Scoble's argument, that human, social networked facilitated search will begin to compete with the automated power of Google. It may be that certain types of searches are better conducted this way, and I agree to say that these and Facebook will be a Google killer is pushing it, but nevertheless we should be thinking about different ways search will be performed. These will be determined by the type of knowledge we seek to find. For instance if I want to find a consultant to produce some Flash animations in education, I could use Google, but KnowledgeBook in Facebook, or a search in LinkedIn might be a better bet. 

iv) As I mentioned to an outsider the debate looks very technical and about small details (a directory is not a search engine), and all this is rather reminiscent of the very fine hair-splitting we see amongst religious sects. They may have 90% of their beliefs in common, but will argue (and sometimes fight to the death) over very small details. Proximity sometimes breeds contempt. Take football teams for example, Spurs fans don't hate Barcelona fans because they have less in common with them, they hate Arsenal fans because they have more in common, and they see them every day.

Childcare, summer holidays and my neglected blog

This summer has been tough on the old blog, and it makes me realise I'm a fairweather kind of blogger. We've had a couple of holidays, and I think divorce would loom if I were to say, 'do you mind if I blog while we sip our G and Ts?'. And when not working we've been juggling childcare. My day usually goes something like: the morning I work, while daughter watches TV/plays with toys/gets frustrated with playstation; in the afternoon we go out and do something child oriented; in the evening my wife takes over and I do some more work.

This means I can just about keep up with work, and seeing the contortions other parents get themselves in to over the summer holidays, it makes me appreciate the flexibility of my job and employer. But it doesn't leave much room for anything else, and so this blog has suffered. This has been partly because I haven't had the time to write anything, but also because I haven't had the time to stay connected. I haven't looked in my Google reader for over a week now, and feel slightly nervous about doing so, like when you know you've spent too much money and don't want to look at your bank balance.

I thought I would keep the blog going better over the summer, but it has shown me you need to maintain momentum, and once you lose that the inertia required becomes considerable. I guess this demonstrates what kind of blogger I am (despite my 81% addicted to blogging score recently). It also made me wonder whether it's worth blogging over the summer, since many other people are in the same position (my aplogies, this is a northern hemisphere bias here, to Southern hemisphere bloggers it's not a downtime at all). You could write the killer blog post and it'd be lost amongst all the 'Mark all as read' clicking everyone does when they return to their bulging RSS feeds.

One last thing - despite not actually blogging for a while, I have been thinking about it. In Majorca, at a water park (which was like hell, but wet) I was mentally composing a posting while queuing for a slide. When I was at Gullivers World in Milton Keynes, I had a good idea for a posting on Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. In the car driving to Cornwall, I put together some thoughts on digital culture, web 2.0 and the nature of expertise. Alas, never to be posted. Is there such a thing as blog angst I wonder?

Software sedimentation

I came across this term from Jaron Lanier (in an essay in the book The Next Fifty Years). He writes:

"Software sedimentation is a process whereby not only protocols, but the ideas embedded in them become mandatory. An example is the idea of the file.... Files are now taught to students as a fact of life as fundamental as a photon, even though they are a human invention."

I think there is truth in this, and I like the mental image of sediment building up within the concepts built in to software and technology. To expand the idea out somewhat, the same might be true of many educational practices. The lecture for example (stop groaning at the back), is mandatory because of the physical and cultural sedimentation embodied in university campuses, so that to many academics and students, it seems natural. But like files in software, there are other ways to approach the particular problem (how to move someone from a position of not knowing to knowing in this case). InLanier's example software is part of the problem, but for other examples, software and technology can be part of the solution - because by using new technologies it makes practitioners think about new ways of doing things. Sedimentation can be very hard, and costly, to remove, and potentially new technologies offer a means of achieving this.

This does however, argue for a more radical shift in our deployment of e-learning technologies than my succession model proposes. The danger of a slow change is that it allows sediment to build up - as an obvious example, VLEs that simply mirror the lecture practice.