The Ed Techie

OU 40th vids

It was the Open University's 40th Birthday today. Lots of people wished it (us?) happy birthday via Twitter, so I grabbed these, plus some official photos from the image bank (am I allowed to use these?), and put them into Animoto to create a virtual birthday card. Below are two versions, see which one you like best:

I'm aggregating, aggregating (a shiny show special)

Image: Different uses of tools from last post, created in Gliffy

Following on from my last post, I have been looking at tools which allow users to collect together different online resources for sharing. What I'm interested in is aggregating and sequencing content together so you can distribute your sequence to others easily, a kind of flash mini-course creator. Scott Leslie twittered the other day, asking a similar thing and pointed me at the wiki scratchpad for his upcoming educator as DJ talk. So I worked through some of these, and here si my experience:

Tumblr - as I mentioned in my previous post, I've rather taken to Tumblr. It's real selling point is the ease of use, simply install the toolbar button and you can easily add anything into your Tumblr blog. It is thus ideal for harvesting all the web paraphernalia you encounter in any one day. I see it more as a personal record, like Liam I see it as a kind of digital scrapbook. But it seems a very personal, slightly anarchic tool, so not really suited to my aim of sharing a defined sequence of resources. Here is my version of Tumblr.

Posterous - AJ Cann is a fan of Posterous, and like Tumblr it's easy to use and ideal for instant sharing and harvesting. Functionally there isn't much to use between the two, I could try and justify my preference for Tumblr but it would be post-hoc rationalisation. Maybe it was the aesthetics of the themes in Tumblr, I'm a shallow kind of guy, but it's often an emotional 'decision' between similar software. Here is my Posterous.

Suprglu - this is a site for aggregating the various social data elements you create in other sites and presenting them in one nice package, sort of like your Facebook/MySpace profile, but prettier. So you can add in RSS, your LastFM tracks, Flickr, delicious, etc. It generates some tags from your content also. It's easy to use, and if you are active with different tools and what an easy to create central hub to represent your identity, it works well. It isn't about sharing a sequence of resources as such, but I guess you could create a suprglu page for a project or subject, and not an individual, which would create a dynamic set of resources. Here is my suprglu page.

Glogster - I covered this in a previous Shiny Show. It lets you embed various resources into a multi-media poster. This is probably closer to what I was after, but you can't get a sequence from it.

SecondBrain -I signed up for SecondBrain ages ago, but didn't really get it. Like suprglu it is a self-aggregation (definitely not to be confused with self-flagellation) site, but rather more extensive with password authentication agreements across a number of sites so you can pull in your content from everywhere. My initial confusion over it remains however, I'm still not quite sure what it's for. While suprglu gives you a nicely presented site, SecondBrain seems to be offering too much, it is partly a conversation and partly a resource share, and I'm not sure it works as either. But it may work for some as an archive of your online activity. Here is my SecondBrain site.

FriendFeed - again, I've not really taken to FriendFeed, although I know some people swear by it. Initially I viewed it as a twitter rival, but it has become more of an aggregator, pulling in various streams from yourself and others. The use of FriendFeed 'rooms' which allow you to gather together several streams may go some way to providing the sort of dynamic content around a particular subject, but it doesn't provide the predetermined, shareable sequence I was after. Here is my FriendFeed.

Trailfire - this lets you create shareable trails across the web, with associated comments, so on each page a trailfire link is added, allowing you to read my comments, add those of your own, and then move on to the next resource. This is close to what I want, although the interface definitely needs a bit of work, and I'm not sure how robust it is. Like most tools it has an easy to use toolbar button, so I can quickly add any site into a particular trail. I'd like it to be exportable as embed code, but this is the closest to what I had in mind, so have a look and see if it works for you. I created a trail for the sites in this post.

I'm disaggregating, disaggregating

I had a play around with different sites for aggregating together different resources and social profiles recently (see next post for comparison). As a result I have started using Tumblr quite a bit. As a result I have found a new slice of my online identity which a) I didn't know needed expressing and b) is distinct from other parts of my online identity which are currently satisfied mainly by this blog and twitter with a bit of Facebook, LastFM, delicious, etc thrown in.

So how am I using Tumblr? Pretty much as you'd expect, it's my online dump for anything interesting I come across, any half thoughts I have, things I may want to use later on, stuff to share, etc. I never became a big social bookmarker, but I am using Tumblr partly for this function.

The thing that differentiates Tumblr from this blog is the close-to-zero threshold. My blog has become the place I think things through. This means I rarely post straightforward links, or comments. There are lots of mini-posts, half-formed ideas then that never see the light of day on Edtechie. I know what you're thinking: if this is the stuff that gets past his quality filter, I'd hate to see what doesn't make it - well now you can at Edtechie Dumbr! And what differentiates my use of Tumblr from Twitter is that Tumblr is more about resources, compared with social interaction.

To summarise: Twitter is where I tell people I am going to the cinema and discuss it, Tumblr is the place where I share a clip of that film and Edtechie is the place where I build it up into a laboured analogy for elearning.

The reason I prefer Tumblr for sharing resources over delicious is that it mixes in more ingredients and elements of the personal. But that is only a marginal reason, and others prefer to use Twitter, Facebook or their blog in the way I am using Tumblr (or to use Posterous instead of Tumblr). So here's my five 'duh well of course' conclusions:

1. Your online identity continues to evolve
2. There is overlap between different tools to achieve this
3. There is no 'right way' to use a tool
4. Share, share, share.
5. Embed, embed, embed

VLE vs PLE fight club

<Image Pirate Test by Danksy http://www.flickr.com/photos/petedanks/2770208173/>

I did a debate with Niall Sclater for the upcoming OU course Technology enhanced learning around PLEs and VLEs, 'refereed' by John Pettit. We pitched it as me being the PLE guy and Niall the VLE man, for the sake of discussion, but we're probably closer in agreement than this would suggest.

You can listen to the audio here (including jazzy intro and fade-out music). [Update, jazzy music is courtesy of http://www.oliverledbury.co.uk/]

For a one take shot, I think it comes out reasonably well, although I am the least coherent of the three.

G20, media and trust

<Image - G20-London-Protest by Room1834 http://www.flickr.com/photos/0742/3405203655/>

There are so many lessons, pointers, revelations, areas of concern and epiphanies from the G20 protests that blogging about them seems almost superfluous. But to add to the comment mountain, here are my thoughts.

Social vs Traditional media
I listened and watched the coverage on the BBC and Sky, while simultaneously tracking events on twitter and Flickr. At the time the traditional coverage seemed biased against the protestors. Traditional media needs to go after a 'story', a narrative it can use to conveniently bundle events together, and it had decided crowd trouble would be that story. Some of the commentators on the traditional media bordered on the offensive - one business expert bemoaned that the protestors won't achieve anything and it will inconvenience people working in the city. Inconvenience? Bloody inconvenience them? Their behaviour has done far more than 'inconvenience' the rest of us.
Over on Twitter the picture was much more of aggressive tactics from the police and of protestors being penned in. This is just as biased in its way, but what it revealed was that 'the story' emerges from the stream, it isn't determined (or worse, predetermined) by a few.
Subsequently it turns out that the real story, or at least the 'feel' was better conveyed by social media than traditional media.

Policing and accountability
I think it is very easy to portray it as protestors = good, police = bad in this scenario but that is naive and simplistic. It was obvious to me that we would have some such accounts of police brutality at the event by watching the twitter stream where the general sense was of antagonism towards protestors. This should be no suprise really - prior to the demonstrations the police had been told  to expect violence, by police chiefs, but also by various protest groups. It had been set up for the police and protestors as a conflict situation - if you come into any situation expecting that, then you will interpret actions accordingly.

The key then is not a review of police practice so much, but a review how the protest was represented to the police. Senior officers could have pitched it along the lines of  'Our job is to help these people protest safely. They're angry at what has happened and to be honest, we know how they feel, so help them demonstrate, but any signs of trouble and we'll stamp it out quickly.'  That creates a different mindset and relationship with the protestors.

I also wonder if the police send in officers, or use trusted people, to report back to them on what the experience was like from the other side? A sort of customer review. And then to have these people come and brief officers prior to demonstrations. Does anyone know if they do this? One of the issues seems to be that some police have stopped viewing protestors as people with whom they have any connection, and vice versa.

Counter-terrorism

The danger for the police is that we are seeing a politicization of policing last realised during the 1980s. This is largely a result of many of the counter-terrorism laws, which themselves have become political vehicles for maintaining control over the general populace. I'm not particularly radical (you've guessed that eh?), and when many of the laws were introduced I didn't really see how they would affect me. But as John Naughton points out the manner in which photography is now regarded as an illegal or subversive act does not reflect the type of society we expect in the UK.

It is not the groups who always mistrust the police that are a concern, it is when they lose the trust of the general population that problems arise. It makes all aspects of their job much more difficult, and ultimately that isn't good for any of us. If the police become divorced from the general public, and seen more as servants of large businesses and politicians, it will take a very long time, a lot of community inititiatives and lots of money to rebuild that trust, so my advice would be to stop and reconsider their role now.

Policing of demonstrations is now often under the guise of anti-terrorism which gives the police powers to do pretty much what they like. This is tempting - why be constrained when you can be free to do what you want? But they should resist the temptation to go to the anti-terror well too often. Trust in the police had been on the increase, and this after a lot of genuine hard work. Here's a simple rule they should bear in mind, adapted from running:

• Trust is like muscle - it is hard to get and easy to lose.
• Suspicion is like fat - it is easy to get and hard to lose.

Surveillance
After years of being watched and monitored tables are now being turned. Without the video evidence would there have been any enquiry about Ian Tomlinson? And like DRM, trying to control the use of video and photography is an ultimately doomed enterprise - it's too easy, to ubiquitous and too quickly disseminated. Paul Carr has a good piece on this, and how we'll all have to learn to accept there's no such thing as private any more, and why this may not be a bad thing.

So, overall what is all about? Technology and Trust, and the changing relationship between the two. We will have a new relationship with trust because technology demands it.

On economy as metaphor

Stephen Downes takes me to task over the reciprocity economy, stating that

"One thing people tend to get wrong about networks is to interpret them as some sort of economy or value proposition... I think this metaphor is really misleading. As I write in the comments, "It's not about reciprocity. It's about sharing. Completely different concept."

I'll defend the post against these counter-arguments in a couple of ways. Firstly by talking about the nature of metaphor and secondly by exploring the role of sharing.

I knew Stephen, being the lovable old socialist he is, wouldn't like an economy metaphor. But we don't have to like, or take all of the elements of a metaphor, in order for it to be useful. Metaphor is a form of mapping across domains, from a source domain (in this case economy) to a target domain (in this case PLNs), with the intention that the source domain will help us understand the target domain better. Of course, no metaphor is perfect, indeed can not be, otherwise it would be the target domain. So we should only map across certain elements.

Viewing something as an economy has some potential benefits, but we must always be careful not to extend the metaphor too far. For example, we can view nature as operating some form of economic principles (indeed Malthusian economics helped Darwin formulate the theory of evolution), but that doesn't mean we extend the principles of intentionality from the agents - we don't anthropomorphise animals and plants as selling and exchanging goods.

So when I said we could view PLNs as a form of reciprocity economy, I was suggesting that we build up a sense of identity capital, and that reciprocity is the 'currency' through which exchange is realised. I didn't mean to suggest that, for example, we set out to utilise our personal network for monetary gain. In this respect I think the metaphor needs flushing out, but I think Stephen's argument that I interpret a network solely as a value proposition is simplifying it.

Secondly, Stephen said in the comments and in the post that it is about sharing, which is a completely different concept. I'm not convinced they are as widely separated as he suggests. I tried to make it clear that I was proposing a more subtle form of reciprocity - it is far beyond a simple 'I'll do something for you if you do something for me' kind of exchange. And I was talking about the manner in which one develops a personal network, which adds value to your life. This, it seems to me, goes beyond merely sharing. I admit that sharing is the base, the sine qua non, of your network, since if no-one shares then you cannot even begin to establish a network. But, when that network becomes meaningful is when you form relationships, and have exchanges. It is when an element of reciprocity is added over the blanket sharing that the network attains a more significant role in your life.

Sharing is to reciprocity as gold-mining is to jewellery making - the latter cannot exist without the former but it is the latter which adds real value and interpretation.

But ultimately metaphors come down to choice - they aren't really right or wrong. Often it is by arguing around the metaphor itself that we come to understand the target domain better. Some people will find the reciprocity economy useful, others not. I'm still not sure myself how useful it is, but for the moment I think it's worth kicking the tyres (to use another metaphor).

Someone Once Told Me (format matters)

Via Sam Easterby-Smith I came across a site called Someone Once Told Me. The idea is simple: the photographer, Mario Cacciottolo, either takes, or gets people to send in, a black and white photograph with the person holding a sign on which is written something someone once told them. It's simple, yet this format throws up a lot of interesting photographs and comments.

I told my daughter about it, and asked her what she would put on a sign. Her instant response was 'It's against the law to sing Christmas songs when it isn't Christmas.' Turns out a friend at school had imparted this piece of knowledge to her, and she had vehemently disagreed with it. I was hoping she would recall one of the many pieces of advice I had given her, but no, this was it. She then wanted to take the photo of course, and today it appeared on the SOTM site.

There are a number of things this brought home to me. The first was participating in sites such as these will become fairly normal for her generation. It is not like appearing on TV. Secondly, this is a good example of a hybrid of expertise and crowd-sourcing. Mario sets up and takes a lot of the photos, but he also gathers them from others (I took our one). This works well both ways.

But most significantly it reveals how a good format helps unleash creativity. There are some very good photos on the site. If they had been given the freedom to take any photo then most wouldn't be as good. The essential paradox is that by limiting scope you encourage creativity. There are lots of such examples around: Carl Morris, a Cardiff acquaintance, runs Sleeveface, where people take photos using album covers to represent faces, and via Gardner Campbell I came across a Flickr group that tells a story in 5 pictures.

I think coming up with such formats, that encourage participation and provide a sufficiently broad, yet narrow, format will be a skill to develop in many sectors.

Course to Dis-course

As part of my Year of Future Learning thang (yes, you hoped it'd gone away), I've organised with George Siemens an online mini-conference called 'From Course to Dis-course', runs May 14th - 15th. The aim is to look at the future of the course in a digital world. I think that the course, as we know it, provides a nice tight focus, but at the same time it is the base unit of education - it's something we all understand. So using it as the means to explore the impact of digital technologies will provide a useful indication of changes in higher education overall.

And what a line-up we have for you, ladies and gentlemen: George, Grainne Conole, D'Arcy Norman, Josie Fraser, Tony Hirst, and, err, me. Plus a few more to come.

So, it's free, it's informative, it's fun - what more do you want? See you there.

BTW - hashtag is #course09

OpenEd conference - be afraid

Scott asked me to be on the committee for the Open Ed conference, which is in Vancouver this August. These are dangerous people - unfortunately I can't go, so I urge other right thinking Europeans to submit papers so they can go undercover and report on their activities.

[For non-UK readers this is a remix of the current paranoia posters in the UK. See Boing Boing for better remixes.]

The Reciprocal Times

Following on from the previous post about The Reciprocity Economy, I am going to try another of my rarely successful experiments. This time I want to test whether Twitter can act as an easy aggregator for examples of the reciprocity economy in action.

So, I've set up a Twitter account: @reciprocaltimes (see, it's like the Financial Times for the reciprocity economy?).  I will use it to tweet examples of when I encounter the reciprocity economy in action. But also, by sending a reply to @reciprocaltimes you, yes YOU, can also help collate them.

We can then analyse them and see if there are any common themes and if the reciprocity economy concept has any value in considering online interactions.

I'm in danger of compounding experimental variables here - I am both testing whether the theory has any merit, and also whether twitter is a useful collation method, so a failure won't tell me which one is wrong necessarily. To overcome this I have set my success criteria as low as  I can: ten replies from someone. Go on, make me a sucess.

	The Smiths - Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want
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	Found at skreemr.com