The Ed Techie

Riffability and MPO

Couple of quick terms for you to play with, and no apologies for butchering the English language, it likes it really.

Riffability - the potential for a resource or idea to generate quick modifications, for it to be riffed upon by others.

Riffability is one (but not the only) factor for how memes, ideas or social objects work. If something has a high riffability rating, then it means others will modify it, suggest alterations, or explore ideas around it. Not everything that spreads is riffable - some ideas/outputs are just perfect as they are and you just want to share. Others promote debate and discussion, but that's not the same as riffing.
A few examples: one of my Cardiff twitter contacts, Sianz, produces food/object based visual puns in twitpic. These are very riffable I think, and thus the photos themselves act as social objects around which others congregate.
The discussion I had (particularly with Andy) on metrics is an example of something that isn't riffing, it's debating (or just plain arguing). But had I couched the original post in the sense of 'here's some metrics I'd use', then it might have been more riffable, in that others could have pitched in with their suggestions. When Scott Leslie was preparing his Educator as DJ talk, it was a riff which some of us could work with.
So I think some ideas have more riffability than others, and you can pose your idea in a manner that has greater riffability. If your intention is to get input from others, then learning how to inject a bit of riffability may be a developing skill (when HR consultants offer courses on 'Improving Riffability' I'll know the term has made it).

MPO - Multiple Personality Order (as contrasted with Disorder). Following on from my last post, comments from Pete J and Jim G, questioned whether we only had one online personality and whether we weren't all a bit schizophrenic. I think they're right, my final conclusion that 'your academic identity = your online identity' was too simplistic. Your online academic identity will be a subset of your online identities. I follow a few people on twitter for instance who have a professional and a personal id (you know who you are). Sadly, their professional one is, well, a bit boring compared with their personal one. But I think this reiterates what I was trying to say in my talk on identity - we're still at the beginning of all this.
Increasingly people (particularly teenagers) will develop and cultivate multiple personalities online. This is an astute, and dexterous, thing to do. It allows them to have a pseudonym which might be the identity where they can mess about, swear, talk rubbish and connect only with trusted friends and like-minded people. At the same time they can have at least one other personality which is a more public facing one, which is closely allied to the real identity.
Of course, many people do this very well at the moment, and some environments (virtual worlds in particular) actively encourage a separation of 'real' identity and online one. My conjecture is that it will become the norm, and take place in more publicly social spaces. And it is likely people won't stop at two identities, but have many. When you add into this that people find you in different spaces and so may have one facet of your personality exaggerated (eg if you follow someone in LastFM but not twitter, you would have a different impression of them), then defining what exactly is 'your identity' becomes increasingly difficult.
But this is a good thing and just a natural adaptation (I'm not doing a Greenfield and arguing social networks will cause MPD). I've always found the sort of person who prides themselves on only having one aspect to their personality rather odd, those people who declare 'I'm me, take me or leave me, I call a spade a spade' etc. Being able to nuance your behaviour to a given environment (without being completely false) is a skill. And online, when stuff hangs around forever and can be spread globally in an instant, being adept at doing this will be increasingly significant.

Blogging and academic identity

Blogging and academic identity

View more OpenOffice presentations from mweller.

I gave a talk recently about blogging (twittering, etc) and how we create online identities for ourselves. The slidecast is above. I wanted to explore some ideas, the main ones being:

• It is about identity, not technology X
• Your identity will be constituted from several different tools/services
• Your configuration and emphasis of those tools is part of what makes the identity (as well as what you put in them)
• An online identity is becoming default for academics now
• All this is driven by really easy and diverse ways of sharing
• There are numerous benefits to you as an academic

I concluded with two propositions, which you might like to disagree with:

1. Soon, your online identity will be your academic identity
2. There is an online identity of some form out there for everyone

I hope you find the presentation useful - I have to say I've come to loathe the sound of my own voice and my incoherent rambling so much, I think I may desist from doing slidecasts. Whatever my online identity is, it's not as a raconteur.

Some more thoughts on metrics

Following on from my last post on the possible use of metrics to measure online digital reputation, here are some more thoughts.

Andy Powell took me to task in the comments, arguing eloquently that the metric is so obviously flawed that it is positively harmful. I've been pondering this, and here are some reflections, both for and against. As the methodology is the property of the consultants, I don't know exactly how the algorithm works, so am guessing from the results.

I can see at least three possible problems with the methodology:

1) A deadly attractor - given the search term used ('distance learning'), the OU unsurprisingly dominates the space. I am guessing that close association with the OU then boosts other sites. So, for example, if I had this blog, but was a Professor at, the University of Glamorgan, say, then my ranking wouldn't be as high.
2) An echo chamber effect - a lot of the sites tend to reference each other (me, Tony, Brian, Grainne, for example). You then get a positive reinforcement effect. They claim to have adjusted for this, but I'm not convinced.
3) Bias in initial setup - the blurb seems to suggest that they find the influential sites by searching and analysis, but there must be some priming. The list is heavily UK-centric for example. This may be a result of the term used (see below), but until we know how each search is initiated I think we have to suspect some initial influence depending on the starting parameters.

Search term - as I mentioned in the original post, the search term is significant. 'Distance learning' is very niche - it's not 'online learning' or 'elearning'. Had it been then the list would have been very different. This (plus the things above) may account for some notable absences from the list - why no Stephen Downes for instance, who we would surely think of as the hub par excellence?

Results may be revealing - Andy argues that the presence of Brian Kelly demonstrates that the list is nonsense as Brian doesn't really blog about distance learning. But I think it may be telling us something interesting. It can't just be random, and why is Brian higher than Grainne, for example? It could be telling us that people who write about distance learning tend to reference Brian, even if he doesn't write about it directly. In this sense Brian does have 'influence'.  It could also show us that people who are writing about distance learning online are writing more about IT than pedagogy. This in itself is revealing isn't it?

It's not just popularity - popularity is a factor, and in some respects is a proxy for influence. But we all know that popularity can be gained for all sorts of unacademic things. So popularity is a factor, but only within a given context - it's not about the overall number of subscribers say, but the number of links relating to a given term, and its semantic cousins. So, if I was the expert in modern interpretation of Macbeth say, then I would expect to have the leading amount of links relating to this topic, even though the number of links would be small overall, because it is a niche subject. I wouldn't be a popular blogger relative to every other subject, but within this very specialised subject then I would be 'popular' relative to other subject sites.

Gaming - any algorithm is subject to gaming, as is any system. Exams and the REF are subject to gaming, but the key is to put in enough checks to make gaming difficult, detectable, and ultimately not worth the effort. Any such algorithm would need to be sophisticated enough to avoid obvious gaming.

A metric would only be a partial solution - I think we'd probably always want an element of peer-review in any analysis, and wouldn't rely solely on an automatic measure. But rather we could view an algorithm as part of a portfolio of evidence an individual might present.

We've got to start somewhere - my take on this is that the output may have problems, but it's a start. We could potentially develop a system focused on higher education, which is more nuanced and sophisticated than this. By analysing existing methodologies and determining problems with them (such as the three I've listed above) we could develop a better approach. I hold out hope that we can get interesting results from data analysis that reveals something about online scholarly activity.

Connections versus Outputs

<image No Trumpets Please! by Mr Jaded http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaded/1907907/>

Warning! This post may contain own trumpet blowing!

Laura Dewis sent me a report the lovely OU Online Services people had prepared in collaboration with consultants (MarketSentinel). They were interested in examining the broader influence of various web sites and looking at sentiment mining. The idea from an official communications perspective being you can see how well regarded your institution is in different sectors, and maybe influence that perception.

But from my perspective the analysis they performed could be tweaked to provide a measure of an individual's influence or prominence in the online community of their particular topic. As you will know, I am interested in the concept of 'digital scholarship' and in trying to get the type of online activity many of us engage in recognised as scholarly work.

The problem has been a mismatch between what has traditionally been measured to indicate academic standing in a particular field and the type of activity that takes place online. In short, the formal systems such as the RAE or the REF in the UK, are focused on outputs. They make a nod towards impact, or reputation, but it's really outputs that they want - and we largely know what these look like in this world: Refereed  papers in respected journals; Keynote speeches; Gaining large research bids; etc. These don't map well onto the digital world - is 1000 blog posts good? What about 1000 subscribers? Is having a large twitter network a sign or standing? All too easily such measures fall down. So I have been looking for something more robust which might act as a metric for measuring an individual's reputation in their subject area.

The report the Comms team provided me gets some way towards this. They chose the subject area of 'distance learning' really as a test to see how it worked - one would expect the Open University to come out well in this. Here is the blurb from the company on how they determine influence:

"a stakeholder of a topic is “an entity (individual or organisation) who is sufficiently  referenced in the context of the topic” .
When performing a MarketInfluence study our computer systems initially collect any documents on the Internet (web pages, Word, pdf or PowerPoint documents) which match a defined search phrase.
These documents (often hundreds of thousands) are then analysed. The analysis is especially focused on identifying who references whom.
Based on these references it is possible to calculate influence."

Influencers

They then apply a number of filters to prevent self-citation. From this they drew up the following list of top 100 influencers in 'distance learning':

I come out 4th, Brian Kelly 6th and Tony 10th. I'm sure that Tony and I both gain some credit benefit from being associated with the OU, which drags up our distance learning status, but even so the mix of individuals in with large professional output such as the Guardian, JISC and BBC is interesting - the space has become democratised to an extent.

Betweeners
They then have a measure of friends in common, what they term 'betweenness':

"Stakeholders with high Betweenness are “stations” where information (on the issue in focus) is passed via in order to reach the constituency of said stakeholder. "

Here is the table for those with high betweenness:

So Brian, Tony, Alan, Grainne and I are all good conduits for information (in this narrow domain). Individuals seem to work better as betweeners than organisations it seems.

Hubness
They reference Gladwell's Tipping Point and his notion of 'connectors', to suggest some sites/people have a high level of 'hubness': "Hubness is the characteristic of disproportionately linking to those who are authoritative on a given topic."

Again, people tend to be better hubs than organisations. Oh, and from now on you MUST address me as 'your hubness'.

It is still problematic, and could be gamed. I don't know enough about the algorithms used to assess this. One would also need to be careful about the search term used - 'distance learning' is quite a niche, UK term I think (had it been 'educational technology' we would have had a very different list). But, all this isn't (just) about ego massage - it strikes me that if we could develop such an algorithm so that we could easily enter any subject domain, this would provide a useful tool for measuring an individual's online influence/reputation/status etc in their field. This would then provide evidence for justifying this type of work and in seeking promotion. It could offer us the Alt-REF I was after. At the moment this work belongs to the consultants, and we would want to tweak it for academic use, but it does suggest that such an analysis is possible.  A JISC project to develop the service for all academics?

What this gets at is that online activity is different - it is less focused around outputs and more around overall activity and reputation. And it does begin to back up what I've always felt - that this stuff isn't just peripheral, playing around, but increasingly is significant to individuals and organisations. I wouldn't want to try, but one could think about it in monetary terms - how much is this influence worth if you were to try and buy it (through advertising or other means?).

Robin Mason RIP

(I hope Robin's family and friends don't mind me posting this).

I was deeply saddened to hear that my colleague, Robin Mason, passed away today. It was Robin who brought me to the Institute of Educational Technology (from the Technology Faculty). Robin was a pioneer in e-learning, and fabulously well connected in the educational world - everyone knew, and liked, Robin.  Like John Naughton, Robin was one of the big influences in my early academic career at the OU - I learnt from her how to tread the right balance between scholarly activity and practical application, and just plain have fun with new ideas.
Interestingly I was warned against working with Robin (and with John for that matter) because she was 'maverick' (yes, that was the term used). This seems to me now the highest accolade I could ever hope to achieve.

Bridging the gap - book chapter

A while ago, I wrote a chapter with James Dalziel on bridging the gap between web 2.0 and higher education. It was published in the Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, edited by Stylianos Hatzipanagos, & Steven Warburton, and published by IGI. There are some good chapters in this book, so it's definitely worth a read (despite the rather uninspiring title). I've had news that they are using it again in another book: E-Collaboration: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications.

I wrote most of the chapter at the end of 2007, so it already feels a bit outdated, but I forgot to put the PDF up here earlier in the year, and I know some of you like those proper references so here it is. (I think I am breaking all sort of copyright law in publishing it, but am I bovvered?)

Always-right-ism

A curmudgeon returns

Part 2 in my curmudgeon series (don't worry, after this, it's all utopia again). A couple of posts back I mused that "we have seen the demise of any sense of compulsion or quality. There is no more 'should' anymore. Everything is okay." I pondered whether this started with post-modernism and was reinforced by the internet as echo-chamber.

Ain't no echo chamber

I've been thinking more about it, largely thanks to the excellent comments on that post. On reflection I feel that the echo-chamber effect is probably overplayed. Certainly we tend to talk to like-minded people - this is human nature. Sometimes it is a result of preference: I don't need to talk to fascists to know I disagree with them. But it is also a fundamental aspect of what we term community: in academic circles, theoretical physicists don't advance their science by hanging around with people who they have to explain Newton's second law of motion to - they need to assume a base level of knowledge to be able to have the discussions they need.

Even so, my experience of being online is that my network is far more diverse than my face to face one. There is a great deal of variation in the people in my twitter network, without going to extremes. In this sense it is the opposite of an echo-chamber (a diversity chamber?) and almost every day something will come across my path that I wouldn't have encountered otherwise.

Always-right-ism

But I still feel that, particularly in relation to artistic tastes, the lack of compulsion I mentioned is prevalent in society. I could be wrong about this, and I have no empirical evidence (indeed, what form would such evidence take?). But humour me, and let's pretend I'm not just a grumpy old man, and there's something in it. If it isn't a result of the echo-chamber, maybe it is a result of what I shall, with a frightening lack of imagination, term 'always-right-ism'. We have had two mantras in recent years: The customer is always right, and more recently, the user is always right.

So, us internet users in particular are immersed in an environment where we are repeatedly told we are always right. If we don't get how to use a site immediately, give up, because it's the designer's fault. This is largely true, but coming on the back of the customer is always right attitude, it may start to pervade other areas of our lives.

In education we have seen the customer attitude tainting the student-staff relationship. The student cannot be always right (they wouldn't be a student then) and so the customer approach only works to an extent.

So my hypothesis is that a similar stance has begun to influence people's artistic choices. You struggled to read a book? It's the author's fault. Didn't like a piece of music? They should try and be more accessible. Didn't understand a piece of art? They are being wilfully obtuse. Think Lord of the Rings is the best thing written? That's fine, the rest of the country seems to agree.

But...

Brian Lamb posted a comment on my last piece, quoting Nick Hornby who was bemoaning the notion that reading should be hard:

"One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good... If reading is to survive as a leisure activity…then we have to promote the joys of reading rather than the (dubious) benefits…please, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else"

I have a lot of sympathy with this view. As Nathaniel Hawthorne said 'easy reading is damn hard writing.' The curse of making things difficult to read runs through academia - I have supervised PhD students who feel that if it isn't verbose and almost impenetrable, then it isn't academic. I have spent a lot of my time trying to do the opposite (hence this blog) - trying to say interesting things in an accessible manner.

So I don't think books should necessarily be hard to read (often that's just a sign of poor writing), but you can stretch yourself in terms of the narrative style, subject matter, characterisation, structure, etc. Not every book you read has to be written simplistically, with a straightforward narrative. I recently read Jonathan Coe's excellent biography of the experimental novelist BS Johnson, and I have a lot of sympathy with Coe's stance: he likes books with plot and narrative (the Dickens tradition) but also admires those who experiment with the form. He says of Johnson, he wrote as though it mattered, and I think by extension, if we occasionally subject ourselves to art work that is created by people who thinks it matters, then maybe it matters to us a bit more too.

Some big hitting technologies (shiny show special)

Well, it's been an eventful few weeks for technology releases, which have been blogged to death, but here's a quick roundup from my point of view.

Google Wonderwheel - the smallest of the releases, but potentially significant. Wonderwheel gives a visual representation of search terms, with the term at the centre and then related ones around it. Naturally, each of these terms is itself searchable, so you can quickly build up an expanded search tree across a domain. Here is a search I did using Tony Hirst's blog name (OUseful Info) as the starting term:

You could dismiss this as just some shiny added to search, but hat is interesting from an educational perspective is how users might engage with it, and what would be sharable. It encourages exploration around a topic in a manner that standard text results doesn't, so you explore one term after another. And if that expanded tree of searches is sharable, then what you have is a means of generating mindmaps but with the power of search underneath. The search result itself becomes a more sharable object.

Having said that, it gives some strange results currently (it isn't just a Google search made visual), so it has some way to go still.

Wolfram Alpha - speaking of having some way to go still, we have Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram is touted as the tool which will bring sense to the web. To quote from their site:

"We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity."

The most immediate comparison is with Google, but Wolfram is different, it aims to be more of a scientific oracle: come to it with a question which systematized knowledge can answer and it will generate a structured response.

One has to except it is in alpha (the clue is in the name), but even so, I found it disappointing. For a successful term it generates a page not dissimilar to a wikipedia page (eg try 'clouds'). But given its claims to 'free-form input', this aspect was weak (eg, try 'cloud formation'), and it doesn't degrade gracefully outside its domains (try 'FA Cup'). I do like the structure it provides, with different categories, and the neat bundle of different representations it gives.

Potentially then it could be used to generate overviews of subjects, and in this respect perhaps wikipedia is a better comparison than Google. Beyond this will be the ability to ask more detailed scientific questions, when it might really become a useful tool for helping students become researchers and ask intelligent questions of data.  And this may be our problem with it at the moment - knowing where it fits amongst our current array of knowledge tools. At the moment, it's a wait and see proposition.

Microsoft Natal - this is Microsoft's answer to the Nintendo Wii for the Xbox. It does away with controls and instead claims to be able to allow interaction purely by camera. There is a good deal of demo about it at the moment, so let's not be surprised if it isn't as good as this flashy video:

But let's assume we get there within the next few years. We should view this not as a games console but as an interaction console: the potential for interaction in education are obviously enormous. Can we really expect students to be using forums when they are used to interacting like this? And beyond this it has implications for how we all work - if we had this level of high quality interaction then the notion of a shared physical space (the office) becomes substantially weakened.

While this may be Microsoft hype at the moment, as a vision of interaction it's powerful. And it demonstrates to me that the gap between what we conceive of as technology (and communication, collaboration, user experience, etc) in the educational world and what people experience in the real world is getting wider.

Google Wave - Google seem to have done what many of us have been expecting they would do, and bundle together some apps and add some new ones to create a suite of tools that looks a lot like a VLE/LMS, only interesting. They call it a 'personal communication and collaboration tool', and it's open source. Michael Feldstein has an excellent overview of its potential. Here is a very long video of its announcement:

Jim argues that it is the death of the VLE/LMS. I have been wary of the argument that higher education has to change because the generation of students today are so accustomed to using cool tools and resources that they will demand the same from education. I am sceptical of it from two perspectives:

1) It overstates the proficiency of lots of students

2) Students don't perceive the tools and resources they use in education as the same type of thing as they do in 'the wild', so therefore accept that they have a different experience.

But I think Google Wave and Natal (and if not them, things like them) change this dynamic. These are very much the same type of tool, and doing the same type of behaviour that will be asked of them in education. Even the most accepting student is then going to ask of their VLE, 'couldn't this be better done in Wave?'

The demise of should

This is a difficult post to write, I'm trying to think some stuff through, so if it comes across like I'm a cross between Andrew Keen and Baroness Greenfield, then assume this is because I haven't articulated myself well, and not because I am such a hybrid of bad science and curmudgeon. (If I did I might look something like this:)

 

(Andrew Keen and Baroness Greenfield morph photo via morphthing)

In general, you will know that I think the internet is GOOD THING. I like it. I spend a lot of time there. If I could drink beer with it, I would. But one should consider that even good things are rarely all good. There are downsides to most things.

One of the downsides it seems to me about the net is the commonly quoted echo chamber effect. That is, we spend time with like minded people, and not listening to different voices. I don't buy this completely, stuff comes across my screen everyday that I didn't know, that challenges me, etc. But what I think the net does do is legitimise everything. In general this has been a good force too - people no longer feel isolated because they are different, they can find others like them. Of course, this can be negative, if you are a rabid racist, you don't have to suffer being told you are wrong by everyone, you can find other nutters online who will share your view.

We probably have an echo chamber continuum that goes something like:

• Wilful ignorance - these are people who know they are wrong, or at odds with society and deliberately seek out others of a like mind: Creationists, racists, conspiracy theorists, people who think Dan Brown is a good writer. That sort of thing. The point is you have to go out of your way to find similar viewpoints.
• Accidental ignorance - people who labour under a misapprehension, because their community, network or peers also possess it, or it is a subject they simply don't come across.
• Lazy tastes - people who are generally aware they could move beyond their comfort zones, but don't.
• Occasional venturers - this is probably most of us, we do occasionally stretch our beliefs or tastes, but also we enjoy the stuff we know and like.
• Radical explorers - those who always seek different ideas, and tastes.

My point is not about the first or even second of these categories, but more about the middle - we have seen the demise of any sense of compulsion or quality. There is no more 'should' anymore. Everything is okay. Again, this is largely beneficial to people and society. There is no pressure to say, get married because you feel you 'should' (or live a conventional lifestyle). Saying goodbye to should is one of the great social forces of the 21st century.

But as we wave goodbye to it, we should also ponder what we lose by its demise. The loss of any sense of artistic quality is one aspect which I will miss. The notion of 'quality' in any artistic endeavour took a serious blow with postmodern relativism - everything was valid as an artform. And, again, this has been positive - I like that I don't have to hide my penchant for horror movies and can engage in pretentious discussions about the merits of various 1980s trashy movies with Jim Groom.

But I was always aware that there was more, that one 'should' try and read classics. It was 'should' that led me to Joseph Conrad and Flaubert. Should suggested I try listening to jazz. And should sat me down and made me watch  Nouvelle Vague cinema. All of these have been good things and have pushed my appreciation of cinema, literature and music across genres: that is, I have become a better reader of all novels because I have read Flaubert; and I enjoy Japanese horror because I learnt from French cinema, and so on.

My feeling is that what started with postmodernism has been exacerbated by the net. People's current tastes are always legitimised and there is no compulsion to go further. Thus we have a society that thinks Harry Potter is literature. It's not - maybe (and I am really stretching my maybes here) it's okay as a read, but there is more. And there is more to cinema than comic book adaptations. So, while we might cheer the demise of should in general, we should perhaps mourn the passing of it with regards to society's artistic sensibilities.

But all this is just a vague feeling I have, maybe there's nothing to it.