The Ed Techie

SocialLearn Director

Starting in September I am going to be the Director for the SocialLearn project here at the Open University, for 6 months at least. The Vice Chancellor and senior management have agreed to fund us so we are pushing ahead on a punishing development schedule to have something usable by next February (with releases along the way).

Taking on the responsibility of director is a double-edged sword. On the one hand I can influence the project more and make decisions. On the other hand, I can't blame anyone else.

I am also using the project to explore different approaches to management. My starting rules are:

i) No regular, formal meetings. We have informal, impromptu meetings as we need them with the people who need to be there, rather than everyone coming to meetings which are scheduled.
ii) Alternative forms of output - I want us to go beyond the standard report or paper that nobody really reads, and ends up being the focus of the project itself.
iii) Openness - we will hopefully let you know how it goes as we go along and encourage input.

This last one will be particularly interesting for me - it's easy to be a blogger when you don't have much responsibility, but it strikes me that the as your official responsibility increases so the the amount of stuff you can happily blog about decreases proportionally. So, for the sake of the project I may find that I can say less and less about it. But I hope not, and my default position is to be open as we go along.

So, watch this space and see either a) a successful project come to fruition or b) a Professor unravel before your eyes. Either one should be entertaining.

iTunes nonplus

I had a strange experience with iTunes Plus recently that left me scratching my head at the logic of DRM.

I was trying to create a playlist and realised an album I had bought a while ago wasn't in my library (Chet Baker Sings, if you're interested - it's melloooooooow). It must have been lost in transfers between laptops, so I went to the music store and went through the process of buying it again. In the past when this has happened it has notified me that I already own it and has let me download it again for free. This time however, it said I could download it from iTunes Plus at a discounted price (20p a track), BUT only if I also purchased all the other iTunes Plus tracks it had picked out for me at the same time. So, in order to get the bargain price, I had to spend £3o on tracks that I already owned. Yeah, like I'm going to do that. So for all the fanfare of DRM free music on iTunes plus, it seems to be yet another way of making you pay again for music.

And they wonder why people flock to BitTorrent...

The punk zine approach

The Leisurely Historian has a nice post on what education can learn from the punk zine movement, which flourished around the time of punk. One could also expand it to any fanzine movement really (football fanzines would be another good example), where the DIY ethos makes them more valuable to a certain audience than the glossy, formal productions.

He lists several things we can learn, which I'll touch upon, but you should read his post:

• All you need is Sharpies, tape, and a Xerox machine - ie a lot can be achieved with relatively low resource. For a zine this meant you didn't need an expensive printing press. For an educator this is even more relevant with the proliferation of free tools. You don't need a corporate VLE, or an enterprise licence for broadcast, you can create it yourself from various tools and embed them in a blog.
• Fast and ugly is better than slow and pretty. This is probably another way of thinking of the perpetual beta, and also to move away from thinking everything has to be broadcast quality. Learners will often trade relevance and currency for quality of production, eg they'd prefer a regular vodcast that really helped them with their studies to a BBC programme that was interesting, but tangential.
• Don’t cover what your audience can find elsewhere - oh, how relevant this is for education. This might be the biggest lesson educators have to learn over the next few years. In a pre-digital, pre -internet age the educator did cover everything (supplemented by books and articles), but now there really isn't any need now to provide most of the content. Instead it is the process of link, embed, interpret and provide structure that an online educator adopts.
• Change things up when they get boring, but stay consistent enough that people can find you. This could again be a take on the perpetual beta approach. It isn't necessary to engage in a long user consultation exercise before undergoing a radical overhaul of design, you can change elements and if people don't like them, change back.
• There’s always some lonely kid in rural Iowa who needs to hear what you’ve got to say. Read: Long Tail. In a global education market, and if the cost of course production is low enough (because you're using free tools and content), then you can find an audience. The Semiotics of Soccer anyone?
• Make friends with a disgruntled Kinko’s employee. By this, he means zines used to get friends in offices to do photocopying for them. In the case of edtech it means take advantage of the free stuff available.

OU YouTube Channel is go

Continuing the 'every educator is a broadcaster' theme of recent months, I'm pleased to point you at the OU YouTube channel. It has two main parts (with a third 'Research' coming on line soon): OU Life which has videos from students and staff; and OU Learn which has clips from OU courses.

It'll be interesting to see how it develops. There are only a handful of videos up at the moment. Unlike a conventional university we can't just point a camera at a lecture and get a (quite boring) video. While we have a large archive, the (swear, curse, shout) rights clearance on this stuff is more difficult than it would be in a sane world, so there is something of a bottleneck.

I'm really excited about it though. What I hope is that its very presence is enough to make educators start to think of 'icasting' and producing a range of videos, and even better, getting their students to do the same.

The video above was produced on request from Laura.