The Ed Techie

Why 'will Radiohead make money?' is the wrong question

Ed Felten has a good piece on how the Radiohead experiment can mean they make more money by selling more at a lower price. While I agree with his analysis I think this focus on how the  'you choose the price' model will work misses the point. This is a step along the path to free content so all those who think it's a failure if some people don't pay are looking at it the wrong way - some might pay this time, but next time? Or the time after? Radiohead have a reasonably devoted fanbase who will opt to pay, but for lots of artists that isn't the case - they'll make the choice between fame over fortune. Better to have 1000 people download it for free and generate some buzz than 10 people pay for it.

So the question isn't will Radiohead make money from this release, but rather 'how else might Radiohead make money?' They are offering a proper CD release box set for around £40. This is one model - release for free something that 90% of people will take, and something special for the remaining 10%. This is the sort of thing Gran can buy them for Christmas - 'What does Kevin like?' 'Radiohead' 'Okay, I'll get him the special release'. I would expect to see lots of variations on this - most of an album free and then some special DRM locked bonus tracks you pay for, bundled with some video, interviews, etc. People will crack these and release them free, but for the fan who really wants them they'll be prepared to pay and the rest of us will just take the free stuff.

PS - you may be thinking I am contractually obliged to mention Radiohead in every post at the moment. This is the last one. Probably.

Kindle inches towards the free content scenario

Amazon's Kindle received a lot of positive and negative attention this week. The positives seem to be that people like the device, it goes some way to capturing the tactile and emotional element of book reading, and the connectivity adds another dimension. The negatives seem to be that the DRM and pricing model.

To me though it represents another small step towards the scenario of digital content becoming free. Quoting yourself is bad form I know, but in my post on the Future of content I said

"let us consider what would happen if digital paper really arrived (despite several proclamations digital ink and paper have been stubbornly difficult to realise, but that isn’t the point of my argument). It felt like real paper, you could have it bound in books like real paper, you could write on it like real paper. But crucially the content it displayed could change, you could search it, and it could record all those annotations you made.

Even as something of a bibliophile, this begins to look tempting to me. I like having books as objects on my shelves, but I used to like having vinyl albums and CDs also, but now I only have MP3s (and clear shelves). If digital paper were so good it overcame the 3 benefits of books above, then it would have significant advantages over real paper. "

Kindle isn't there yet, but it's another step along the path. And what we will see happen now is the disintermediation of publishers. As an author I can now publish direct to Kindle. And as Clay Shirky argues, when it comes to a face off between fame vs fortune, fame wins.

Last month Radiohead, this month the Kindle, perhaps the future of content will be with us sooner than even I anticipated.

Connections are more meaningful in the long tail

I can't remember if Chris Anderson made this point, but it came home to me the other day. When you are operating with blockbusters then the connections you make are pretty meaningless since these artists or products have become a commodity, there is very little chance of overlap with other tastes.

Let's take an example of music - I don't really listen to a lot of hip hop/rap (hey, I'm a Smiths fan, what do you expect?) but I like a bit of Kanye West. However, looking up Kanye on iTunes is not really going to find me artists who are similar to him - it wouldn't be a good starting point to get into more rap. This is because he is a popular artist and so the other artists people buy aren't really like him at all. Take a look:

Believe me, I am not going to like any of the similar artists listed here - content discovery in blockbusters breaks down, because the overlap with other content becomes too spread out, so you end up linking only to other blockbusters. But now let's consider a more long tail artist, say the excellent Sufjan Stevens. Now look at the similar artists in iTunes:

I already know and like Midlake, and through this route have discovered Bonnie Prince Billy who has turned out to be a great find, and will check the others also. Content discovery becomes meaningful in the long tail because there is greater similarity between the content.

And the same applies for networking - if I find that someone likes Jaws say, then even though it is one of my favourite films, I wouldn't hold much hope that the other films the person likes would also be of interest. I like Jaws because I consider to be the perfect film in terms of structure and pacing, (and, yes because I like sharks too) but  other people will like it for many different reasons because it will have reached a level of penetration in society that has many different routes to it. But, if we take the Korean horror film, A Tale of Two Sisters, then if I find someone who likes that, I will be much more likely to take their recommendation for other films (the content discovery element), but more importantly, I would probably find dialogue with them more useful aslo.

So what might this mean for education? For a start if we are to encourage content discovery then it shows we need a long tail of educational content. We need a wide range of resources that suit different styles, use different pedagogies and incorporate different media. Even with the investment in OERs we don't have this quantity of content yet.

It also illustrates that if we want to encourage networking between learners, then we need to find tools that help them make meaningful connections. Just being a psychology student isn't sufficient, it will be a mixture of very specific subject interests, plus personal information that will help learners find study buddies who are appropriate.

Blogs easier to read than formal publications

Stunning new research (okay, ten minutes by me this morning) has shown that blogs are much easier to read than formal academic publications, even when they are covering the same topics.

Yesterday Alan Cann put a few bloggers through FLESH, a piece of software that takes text and scores it according to the Flesch Reading Ease Score and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. For the reading ease score, the higher the score then the easier the text is to read. For the grade level it indicates how many years in education a person needs to understand the text. There are some concerns about this method, and the grade level in particular seems dubious to me, and then we have to accept that the software is interpreting it correctly, so lots of room for doubt, but putting that aside for now, I thought I would compare the blog scores Alan obtained with samples of published papers from three of the writers (me, Alan and Grainne).

The papers I used were: Alan's Assessed Online Discussion Groups in Biology Education, Grainne's Using Compendium as a tool to support the design of learning activities (forthcoming) and my Learning Objects, Learning Design, and Adoption through Succession.

Here are the scores for reading ease:

Author	Blog Reading Ease	Paper reading ease
Conole	50.79	32.48
Weller	63.85	34.82
Cann	59.66	36.8

And for reading level:

Author	Blog Reading Ease	Paper reading ease
Conole	12.19	14.2
Weller	9.47	14.04
Cann	9.02	13.55

I'll come on to the reservations later, but at face value this seems to be saying that there is a marked increase in reading difficulty when the same authors write in the formal publication style. Variation for author is controlled, and so to an extent is variation in subject matter, since the papers are all subjects we blog about (this could be controlled more rigorously though, I admit). Which means the variation is down to the medium, or style imposed by that medium. If general understanding is the goal, then this mini-research suggests blogs are better at achieving it.

Now the reservations:

• Obviously a very limited set, would need to be expanded to many different authors and subject areas.
• Reliability of Flesch - are there some peculiarities in the system that mean academic papers always come out as harder to read e.g. use of references.
• Reliability of the software - how reliably is the software interpreting the Flesch method?
• Interpretation of results - what do these really mean?

If someone was looking for a Masters project  that looks like a neat investigation to me (no doubt someone has already done it, so if you know, let me know).

PLEs and the institution

Following on from all our VLE discussion, this post from Scott Wilson caught my eye. He has another good diagram (I've borrowed his Future VLE one before - with acknowledgement Scott!). I have had my reservations about PLEs, and particularly how they interface with the institution. I like the idea of assembling your tools over time, but there are some real issues about how these interact with institutional systems (authentication in particular - are you a student on this course, what support do you have, how do we verify course records, etc). Scott goes some way to addressing these. I think a telling quote is:

Originally I thought that a personal system could manage all the variety of all connected institutions, but more realistically there does seem to be a real need for a more concrete coordination system sitting between the personal system and the enterprise, for handling jobs such as initial rendezvous and peer association.

Scott suggests a course coordination space where some of this is sorted out - maybe this is similar to my concept of the educator choosing loosely coupled systems. The danger is that maybe too much time gets spent in coordination for every course - which may make the default option of the VLE seem attractive. The response could be 'sure these other tools are better, but we spend the first two weeks of every course thrashing out what we are going to use. The VLE tools are good enough.'

Loosely coupled vs integrated again

Continuing our debate around VLEs (which I'm enjoying anyway), Niall Sclater posts that one of the dangers of the small pieces approach is that we have no control over external sites, and he uses (my favourite web 2.0 site) Slideshare being down as an example.

Tony responds rather cheekily (he tags the post 'baiting') showing the OU site was down, to demonstrate that internally hosted systems are not immune from such dangers.

I would suggest that in a loosely coupled system your risk is spread from a user perspective - if Slideshare was down, that's fine I'll do the wiki activity, or look at the YouTube clips, or read the RSS feeds in Google Reader. There is an alternative activity I can be doing, but if your VLE goes down, you are stuffed since everything is in one place.

In general though, Niall is right, this is a concern (and one I mentioned in my original post). But it gets at something deeper I think than just about choice of hosting services - it's about philosophies and attitudes. The almost universal reaction in all higher education institutions is to control things - be it systems, content, dialogue, roles, etc. And there is a good reason for doing this - universities have a duty of care, both pastoral and educational, to their students, and the best way to deliver on this is to control the environment.

Hence we have educational versions of tools, closed systems, selected readings, etc. And then we have web 2.0 which lets anyone do anything and then puts metrics and filters in place to help you find the good stuff. In order to engage in this world there is going to have to be a good deal of letting go of control - not only will that be hard to do, but it may have serious implications for students (and maybe, legally for universities - what if someone has a bad experience on an externally hosted site which you have sent them to - are you responsible?). I'm not arguing that letting go of control is necessarily better - I just think more and more of it will happen anyway, so we need to be able to handle it. I don't think trying to control things more is a valid response though. This tension between control (and thus being able to assure education) and freedom (where bad things may happen) will be one of the key questions higher education faces in the next few years, and it's far more complex than control= bad, freedom = good.

In yer Facebook

A few people have blogged the Guardian report "Students tell universities: Get out of MySpace", based on the JISC project, in which the message from students seems to be that they want a separate space and don't want universities and educators invading it.

This will be all that many doubters need as justification to say that we shouldn't be bothering with all this social networking stuff. Here's why I think we should ignore that advice, or rather we should ignore it in a particular way.

Firstly, the use of networks changes - after the initial flurry of hitting people with a wet fish or becoming a vampire, people's use of a network settles down I think. So how students feel about FB a year from now will be different from how they feel now.

Secondly, we provide tools and services that help them learn, but don't direct their learning. We are not 'in' Facebook in the same way we are 'in' a VLE, where we monitor progress and contribution. Rather, universities can provide tools (like the FB ones we are developing) which help students learn between themselves.

Thirdly, if this is where they are spending a lot of their time, it is convenient to have some of their formal learning data in here - even if it's just notifications of updates from their VLE. It acts as a base camp then for other systems. This will be the key to why students will want some form of university input in their social network - convenience.

But I do agree that we shouldn't go barging in there and imposing formal systems - they'll only go someplace else. Going out to where students are rather than bringing them into our systems (or doing both more likely), has huge implications for what you design and  do. As soon as you start developing tools for this space, a whole range of applications occur to you that don't when you are inside the formal education space - they tend to be about facilitating connections, adding fun and being viral. Because your app has to survive in the social network ecosystem, this makes you develop ones that are perhaps better suited to the learner's needs than when you control the ecosystem.

Some more VLE demise thoughts

A few people have responded either on blogs or in the comments on my (deliberately provocatively titled) post The VLE/LMS is dead, so rather than distribute my responses I thought I'd bundle them here.

Niall Sclater refers to some earlier attempts at the loosely coupled approach:

The model Martin describes of “loosely coupled teaching” was tried by Canadian schoolteacher Clarence Fisher who blogged about small pieces in November last year and had serious concerns about this approach

Amongst these were different URLs and skills. I'd respond by saying a year is a long time in the online world, and a lot of these issues have become easier - you don't need to have lots of different sites, you can pull them all into one easily, e.g. having your flickr photostream in your blog. And also the awareness of users has changed a lot in the past year - after all, how many of us would have said that Facebook widgest would be a viable means of communicating with students a year ago?

Niall goes on to say

However it is possible that the VLE will evolve into more of a management information system, working away in the background, with its information exportable to a variety of other systems under the control of students who wish to view it in environments they prefer

Yes, I'd agree with this (although whether we'd call it a VLE then is debatable). If we wanted to overcome some of the problems mentioned earlier then some form of student portal would be necessary - you wouldn't have to remember all your urls since the sites would be pulled in to your portal. And this would be one way of addressing the authentication issue too. I am rarely prophetic (although frequently pathetic), so I'll grab it while I can - I ended my VLE book by saying

In this scenario a learner’s environment is more akin to a portal with a collection of tools and content, some of which are provided by the institution and others by external parties. The VLE ceases to be a convenient term or concept at this stage. So, one could argue that, rather like the male praying mantis, the ultimate sign of the VLE’s success is its own demise.

Niall also mentions educators attitudes as does Steven Verjans, who states

not all higher ed teachers - or students for that matter - are as technologically savvy as we think them to be.

This is undoubtedly true, but I think reflects the often poor nature of technologies developed by higher educational institutions which require a four day training course to grasp. Millions of people use flickr, Facebook, wikis, Twitter, etc everyday - because they are simple to use and compelling. My response to this is 'exactly, which is why we should give them the best technologies available which are roadtested by millions, and whose developers have a real interest in making them simple.'

But I know what he means, there are many educators who are just not going to engage with this no matter how easy it is. So, I think that the university still has a role here, my vision would be that it provides a set of tools they can select from, all of which are loosely coupled, and integrated at the back end with student systems as required. I'm an academic, I want a basic course, sure, here's a wikispace wiki, with discussion board, and here's a Wordpress blog, off you go.

The point is that if I do want to use other systems, I'm not prevented from doing so because we are operating a lowest common denominator approach.

Alan Cann suggests that students want the university to provide these services:

The walled garden of the VLE provides a "trusted brand" (as Grainne Conole discussed at OpenLearn2007) which is very attractive to students. Otherwise, why would they want to pay us £3k a year for tuition - and then use Google?
Students hate PLEs (but they also hate being forced to use university services such as authenticated email accounts). "We are paying customers and we want value for money.

I'd start off by saying if the miserable use most universities put Blackboard to (or whatever LMS they have) constitutes value for money then we're all in trouble. On the more general point about students wanting this stuff provided I think that is changing - some anecdotal feedback from our digital photography course where we have provided an OU system to share photos seems to be 'yes it's fine, but we want Flickr,' because that is the tool they are accustomed to.

If universities are using third party systems I don't think students will care particularly, as long as they are getting the best experience they can.

I guess what I'm suggesting is a kind of middle ground between the institutional, one size fits all VLE and the complete anarchy of a PLE. We allow educators to use tools available elsewhere, while making recommendations, and concentrate on providing a framework to use these within (both technical and pedagogic).

I don't expect this to happen quickly, but I do get a sense we are approaching the tipping point. This will be realised through a range of tools which are easy to use and familiarity amongst educators and students.

Edublog awards

If you happened to know of a nice, educational blog anywhere http://edublogawards.com/2007/2007-nominations/

I'm off to nominate Tony Hirst and Alan Cann, just to counter the North American dominance...

The VLE/LMS is dead

(but we'll probably take five years to realise it). Scott Leslie has coined the term Loosely coupled teaching, for the assembly of a number of different, third party apps to do your teaching with. This differs from a PLE in that it is still the educator who provides the tools, they just bypass the institutional systems.  Scott's post set me thinking and I had something of an epiphany (okay, I know I'm slow) - whereas I have been using the odd application you could completely set up your course outside of the institution.

What might you want to use? For my course I could use the following:

• For content and discussion - wetpaint or wikispaces, upload the content, each page has its own forum, and students get to control the content. Or I could create a blog wherein each post is an activity, this has the advantage that students can subscribe. I'd probably go the wiki route though.
• Dialogue - I'd probably encourage everyone to sign up for Twitter or Jaiku, to create a low-level, non-intrusive dialogue between students. We might also need some ongoing discussion board.
• Virtual meetings - I'd use Flashmeeting and schedule regular sessions.
• News and updates - I'd use a blog and get students to subscribe.
• Quiz/informal assessment tools - there are a bunch of these around e.g. Blogquiz where you can embed them in your own page. There's a lot of commercial stuff too, so I think there is room for better free services in this area.

Apart from that I would use any tool as and when you needed it. The wikispace would be the hub, and hopefully you could hang these apps off it easily enough. An alternative would be a Netvibes/Pageflakes space.

Firstly, what are the issues in doing it this way:

• Authentication - this is quite a big one. Students are authenticated via the University database and this feeds through to the VLE and related systems. Single sign on is obviously a big plus here. For small courses you could manually enrol your students on your wiki (if you didn't want it to be open to all), but for some of our courses we have 1000+ students, so that isn't scaleable. Having said that, this is not a problem that is insurmountable. Authentication isn't really my subject area, but with openid, Shibboleth etc people are moving in this direction. What I want is to be able to apply the OU authentication to any site I want, so if I create a wiki I simply tell the OU authentication system to include that url. Maybe it can do this already? The issue of roles is more complicated, but again if we start on this now, it's not impossible to crack.
• Convenience - there is a degree of convenience for both academic and student in having all the tools packaged in the VLE. However, I think there is also an increasing frustration at being limited to these tools, and also an increased ability to cope with a range of tools.
• Support - if you have one centralised system then you can offer centralised support also. If every academic is using a different collection this becomes more difficult. However, these tools are all pretty easy to use, and one could easily have a collection of supported ones.
• Reliability - if we house the VLE then we can guarantee the server times and service level agreement. If it is housed on an external system you have no control if it goes down. This is true and something that keeps IT people awake at night, but this surrendering control is going to be one of those things we just have to get used to as we use more third party apps simply because they're better.
• Monitoring -  one of the tools that a VLE offers is the ability to monitor a student or cohort's progress. These can be useful tools in identifying problems and offering support. While a loosely coupled system wouldn't offer this at the individual level, there are an increasing number of sophisticated analytical tools available (as Tony Hirst repeatedly tries to get me to realise) which will provide much of this information.

That might seem like a big enough list to make you stick with your VLE, but wait, here come the benefits:

• Better quality tools - because offering each of these loosely coupled elements is what each company does, it is in their interest to make them really good. This means they stay up to date, have better features, and look better than most things produced in higher education.
• Modern look and feel - related to the above, these tools often look better, and also their use makes a course feel more modern to a user who is raised on these tools compared with the rather sterile, dull systems they encounter in higher ed.
• Appropriate tools - because they are loosely coupled the educator can choose whatever ones they want, rather than being restricted to the limited set in the VLE. This is one of the biggest draws I feel - as an academic if I want a particular tool I don't have to put a request in to IT and wait a year to get a reduced quality version, I just go ahead and use it.
• Cost - using a bunch of free tools has got to be cheaper hasn't it?
• Avoids software sedimentation - when you have institutional systems they tend to embody institutional practice which becomes increasingly difficult to break. Having loosely coupled system makes this easier, and also encourages people to think in different ways.
• Disintermediation happens - this isn't really a benefit, just an observation. If a services can be disintermediated then it will be. In this case the central VLE system is disintermediated as academics use a variety of freely available tools.

On balance then, I think this shift to loosely coupled, freely available third party systems will happen. It won't happen overnight, and it will follow a succession model, but I would place money on this being the direction things take. Thank goodness I haven't just published a book on VLEs eh? Doh!