The Ed Techie

iPhone - the convergulator

You will remember, no doubt, that during the late nineties and the first part of the decade, there was much talk of 'convergence' in industry, ie that various industries such as music, news, film, games would 'converge' around the internet. This was in some respects, a dream of the big corporations who read it as 'merging' or 'take-over'. The industries still remained under the same basic model, they just used the internet as a delivery platform. But (I think Clay Shirky has argued this but can't find the quote now), convergence didn't happen like that - it was more like the internet took over these industries and transformed them. The term convergence implies a symmetry to the deal, instead of the steam-rollering that actually occurred.

Anyway, it was this now slightly outdated concept of convergence that came to mind when I surveyed the different applications I now have on my iPhone. I know loads of people will have made this point before, but I've only recently acquired an iPhone and there's nothing like seeing it happen in your very house. The iPhone is like some secret weapon devised by an evil genius, 'I call it ... The Convergulator!'. All my other independent devices are now converging (read 'being replaced by') onto the iPhone. Here are the separate pieces of kit I have now replaced by the iPhone

• Music player - obvious I know, but I now have no need for a separate portable music player from my phone, and also something we don't always acknowledge, although I have a docking speakers at home, the idea that I would have a distinct music system for home and for travel has gone.
• Camera - I do have a specialist camera also, and the iPhone one isn't brilliant, but it's getting there.
• Video - i don't even have the 3GS but downloaded an app called iVideoCamera that allows me to record video. Again I do have a specialist video camera (a nice Flip), but do I have that on me when I want to record? No. (App costs 59p)
• Alarm clock - I have a cheap pair of speakers next to my bed and with Alarm Clock Pro I can have some nice display options and wake up to a choice of music. (App costs 59p)
• Running GPS device - I have a Garmin Forerunner which tracks your runs, records pace, etc. It cost about £120. For Christmas my wife was going to get herself one, but instead found RunKeeper Pro. It uses the GPS capability in the iPhone and gives accurate map recording, pace and nice data storage. So she uses this quite happily instead of a Garmin. (App costs £5.99)
• Games console - my daughter has a Nintendo DS (it is almost a legal requirement that a girl of 8 has a DS), but because I got an iPhone she inherited my iTouch. This is now her preferred portable games console. Again, it may not be as sophisticated as the specialist tool but it offers enough.
• eBook Reader - I have yet to play with a Kindle, but when I'm travelling I occasionally find myself without a book. I have downloaded several 'Classics' bundles on the iPhone so I can read some Dickens, plus I have the Guardian app (cost £2.59) so I can read all of their content.
• Digital radio - I use the TuneIn.FM iCar radio app which acts as a digital radio perfectly adequately. (App costs £2.59 or there is a free version).
• SatNav - we already have a TomTom so I haven't actually bought this, but the software is available for the iPhone so that could act as your sat nav system (App costs £59.99).
• Portable DVD player - this is a 'not quite', but we've begun to experiment with loading the iPhone with films for my daughter to watch on trips.
• Laptop - okay, not really, but if, like me, what you mainly do is blog, email and twitter on your laptop then for a short trip away the iPhone is sufficient to act as your computing device

And that is without all the 'normal' convergence you get with just having the internet. In each case the specialist device outshines the iPhone version but the iPhone apps will get better and crucially, it is always there. I remember saying in 1999 that people don't mind carrying separate devices because none of the converged ones were good enough. That's not the case anymore, I think the iPhone has reached the point where they are good enough. And, if you set aside the initial outlay, the cost saving is considerable - most apps are free, 59p or £5.99 at most (the TomTom being the exception). This type of convergence is a result of the generativity Zittrain talks about - opening up (to an extent) the app store has meant that niche developers have filled the gaps previously occupied by separate companies and devices. This isn't confined to the iPhone - we'll see similar with the Android I expect, but it's the example I've seen unfolding before my eyes.

And I believe it acts as a phone as well.

Real friendship

As it's coming up to Christmas, a nice post about the value of friendship. Many of you will have read William Deresiewicz's article in the Chronicle entitled Faux Friendship, which decries the loss of 'real' friendship in the social networking age. I ought to say that compared with most anti-social media pieces of journalism, it's well written and coherent. But it's still wrong, and based largely on ignorance.

We get a sense of where the article is going early on:

"The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?"

The language is telling here - Facebook is a 'distortion' of social space, not an enhancement or a complement. Friendships are 'relegated' to screens, not elaborated through them. We then get on to the key question:

"If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any?"

I think the nature of relationships and friendships and the way online activity influences them is fascinating, so I'm not saying we shouldn't ask questions like this, but you know we are going to have a 'camelot' type argument any moment, which will refer back to some golden age of friendship. Sure enough, it comes:

"Classical friendship, now called romantic friendship, persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, giving us the great friendships of Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau."

This is the classic argument that things now aren't as good as they were, and look, I've cherry-picked some examples from the whole of history to prove it. This is akin to why other supermarket queues always seem to progress quicker than yours - you can only be in one queue while there are many 'other queues', therefore statistically, it is likely that at least one will progress quicker than yours. Because we are egocentric we interpret this in relation to ourselves. It's the same with history, we only have the present to look at since we can only live in one time - compared with all of history there will always be better examples in the past. So when he argues:

"no one in a very long time has talked about friendship the way Montaigne and Tennyson did."

No-one talks about anything the way Montaigne and Tennyson did because they lived in a different age. But to argue that people don't have close friendships now is absurd. Kingsley Amis and Phillip Larkin certainly had that type of friendship, and to choose some more recent low-brow examples how about David Bowie and Iggy Pop, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Ant and Dec? Now they may not be Byron and Shelley from an artistic sense, but you can't deny this is friendship as any age would understand it?

Having set up a decline in the nature of friendship, he then gets onto social media:

We haven't just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.

I agree, this is something new, and is certainly a tweak to friendship. But when you broadcast like this, you do so knowing that most people will ignore it, someone might pick up on it, and maybe an exchange will happen. It hasn't really cost you anything to do. I'd also add that when you form online friendships it's with people who do more than give you an account of what they are doing. The media's simplification that twitter is about 'telling people what you had for breakfast' is missing the point.

But what really irritates me about such articles is how condescending they are, as if we're all to stupid to understand and only the author has seen the light. For example:

The absurd idea, bruited about in the media, that a MySpace profile or "25 Random Things About Me" can tell us more about someone than even a good friend might be aware of

I don't know anyone who believes this, people are quite capable of having different types and ranges of friendships. Only for journalists does it seem to be a binary choice between online and face to face. They also speak from a position of relative ignorance usually. Deresiewicz seems to have used facebook, and that's about it. It maybe that Facebook does afford slightly shallow relationships, although I suspect we'd find a wide variety. When I think of my online friends most of the ones I would classify as friends I know through blogs, but not all, twitter (which he deplores for its brevity) is perfectly capable of creating and sustaining real friendships. So when Deresiewicz argues:

"when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to mind, or their fear of spiders. It is their qualities of character. This one's emotional generosity, that one's moral seriousness, the dark humor of a third."

I think 'yes that's exactly what I think about my online friends.' When I went to Alt-C this year I met some people face to face that I have regarded as friends for some time. Let's take Alan Cann for example, we hadn't met face to face for various reasons, but it was inevitable we would. When I met Alan at ALT-C it was great, but it was also kind of irrelevant - most of our interaction will remain via blogs, twitter, or whatever else comes along. Online friendship isn't 'face to face friendship in waiting'.

One of the common tests of friendship is 'would they lend you money?' and this is sometimes used to demonstrate that online friendship isn't real (Josie Fraser has a stronger test including "In the event of a zombie apocalypse, would you throw yourself between me and the oncoming brain-ravenous hoard?"). I kind of had this question answered earlier in the year when my wife asked for sponsorship for the half marathon. Lots of people who I have never met stumped up real cash. 

I'm not sure why people are so obsessed with the term 'friends' and whether one person qualifies or not. It's all a bit school playground. Are the people I regularly exchange blog comments with or tweets with 'friends'? What about those I only occassionally interact with? I think so, but maybe we do need more terms since being online has opened up whole new niches in 'friendship' which different people occupy.

But as it's Christmas let's stick with 'friends'. Here's my test for online friends - let's call it the 'George Bailey test'. If, through no fault of your own, you got yourself in a fix like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, and you really needed the help of your friends to get you out of it, would the online ones help? In my case, I'd say, absolutely.

On being (almost) a 1000 miler

(it's been a tough year on my trainers)

At the start of the year I set myself a goal to run a 1000 miles this year. That works out at about 20 miles a week, so not too bad when you're going smoothly, but when things get in the way, it mounts up. After a slow start, I was well on target to achieving it at 950 miles at the start of December, when I developed hip bursitis and was told to lay off running for a few weeks. I found this really depressing - running is part of my identity, and not just any old exercise. I'm hoping I can take it up again in the new year after some physiotherapy and maybe a cortisone injection.

But this post is not about self-pity, but about some of the things I've come to understand over the year. You could probably substitute 'learning' for running in most of this and the same would apply (oh, okay, maybe not, but I need someway to justify this post).

• There are no bad miles - the good thing about an overall distance goal, rather than say a pace one, is that even if you have a bad run, it's still miles in the bag.
• Getting going is the tough part - because of my wife being in hospital at the start of the year and all that had preceded that, I hadn't done much running since October 2008. This meant I was starting from a low base - getting a 20 mile week is tough when your doing 3 or 5 mile runs. But crucially I did something, so even if in those first few months I was falling short of the monthly average, it was a whole lot better than doing nothing.
• Big chunks pay off - once I'd got my long run up to 10 miles or more, then hitting and surpassing the weekly average was easy, I could do it in 3 sessions. When you up the big chunk the little chunks get proportionally bigger too, so my shortest run increased from 3 to 5 miles.
• Routine is key - disruptions such as going away on business, holidays, etc make it hard to fit in the weekly schedule, so need careful planning.  By planning the schedule I notched up 70 miles when we were on holiday in France.
• Do it when you can - you don't know what will occur, such as my bursitis, but also picked up a back injury in the summer (not from running but from moving a guinea pig hutch would you believe) which took one week out and a cold in March removed another week. These time-outs impact on the weekly average quite considerably, and I regretted the times I could have gone for a run but had decided not to, as these could have accommodated the injuries.
• A long-term goal is motivating - there were countless times when if I had been just running for the sake of it, I wouldn't have bothered, but the pressure of the overall goal was enough to make me go out.
• Different strategies are required - I don't like treadmill running much, but for a while I made myself get up every morning and do 1 mile on the treadmill in our garage, in addition to any other run I might do. It didn't last long, but it all counted. Similarly I experimented with hill sessions, 5K times and tempo runs to vary it.

So, although I fell short in the end it's been a worthwhile process on several fronts. Healthwise, it equates to about 120,000 calories (or 750 pints of beer if you prefer that measure), and will have kept my heart, if not my hip, in good working order. It's given me routine, and space for reflection. Most importantly it's given me lots of data to obsess about.

And if we're playing the 'running is like learning because' game then the analogy falls down with the final result - unlike your hips, your brain won't get a stress injury from overuse.

Big OER and Little OER

I am in Eskisehir, Turkey currently for the final meeting of the Edushare project. This has partners from Nepal, Bhutan, Cambodia and the Maldives. Two weeks ago I was in Jamaica for a meeting of the Sidecap project, which has partners from Mauritius, Fiji and the West Indies. I took over both of these projects when Robin Mason sadly passed away earlier this year. They both came from EU funding and are both looking at the use of OERs in higher education in what we might call 'developing' (though I'm not keen on the term) countries.

Several things have struck me during these meetings, which I thought I'd share. Many of these are blindingly obvious, but it's when you put them together that the case for OERs becomes strong.

1. The context within which higher education operates varies enormously. Many of these universities are operating across huge geographical areas for instance, but also factors such as internet access will vary from 7% of the population in one place to nearly 80% elsewhere. The demographics will vary, and when you add in political factors such as different governments or regions attitude towards education, it becomes very difficult to make many of the general assumptions we use in higher ed.
2. The financial crisis has hit education very hard in many of these countries. One person told me their funding was 40% of what they had last year. That doesn't leave much room for experimentation with curriculum or technology.
3. The issue of sustaining and developing local communities is becoming increasingly important. If you don't want all your smart people to disappear to get educated elsewhere, then you have to offer them decent education in their home location. Many people would like to stay, but feel they can't and thus the brain drain continues meaning the poorer areas lose the very people who might help them improve.

These three factors have made me rethink my feelings towards OERs. Obviously I was all for OERs from an idealistic perspective, but I was beginning to wonder if the institutional approach of MIT, the OU, etc wasn't a bit, well, learning objects. It is well-intentioned, it is professional, it is academic. It's also a bit dull, not very reusable, doesn't lend itself well to all the tools we like, and is a bit worthy. In short, it wasn't the sort of reusable 'learning' (or any) resource I tend to use every day - such as YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, etc.

But, I've come to appreciate the value of university generated OERs, because they help address the three factors I set out above and also because they have one crucial advantage over the sort of user-generated, web 2.0 resource listed previously, namely status. Status is important in many countries (all?) and many partners reported resistance to the use of OERs because the academics felt that using a YouTube clip (or whatever) wouldn't be seen as proper academic material (by themselves, colleagues or students). But using OERs from internationally recognised universities where the status is not in doubt removes some of this anxiety. It also legitimises the concept of reuse and raises the status of 'free stuff'. More than one partner commented that there was a perception that if content was free, it couldn't be of good quality.

So, given the three factors outlined above it may be that OERs are the only way many countries can realise a sustainable higher education system that meets the needs of their population. And given the status issue, university-generated OERs are a major part in this.

In a response to my pedagogy of abundance talk Michelle Hoyle raised the issue about the cost of OERs, and used the term 'big and little OERs', which I think is a useful distinction (or you might prefer to think of them as top-down and bottom-up OERs).

Big OERs are institutionally generated ones that come through projects such as openlearn. Advantages = high reputation, good teaching quality, little reversioning required, easily located. Disadvantages = expensive, often not web native, reuse limited

Little OERs are the individually produced, low cost resources that those of us who mess about with blogs like to produce. Advantages = cheap, web (2) native, easily remixed and reused. Disadvantages = lowish production quality, reputation can be more difficult to ascertain, more difficult to locate.

A mixture of the two then is complementary and viable I would argue.