The Ed Techie

If social media had been first...

I'm sure someone else has done this before and better, but let's imagine a parallel universe where social media had come before face to face socialisation. Our writer, Richard Liitleinsight for the Maily Blog takes up the story...

The sad truth about 'f2f'

I've never tried face to face (or f2f as it's known by the sad geeks who participate in it), but I know I don't need to in order to understand that it is a facile, shallow form of interaction compared with the rich dialogue we have built up over centuries in social media.

F2F gatherings often take place in specially designed physical spaces. The spaces cannot be altered, people here think moving a chair around is rearranging. Gone is the rich possibility of creating virtual worlds, of being a flying cow or a twelve foot purple cat in a world with 1/3 earth's gravity. No, here people sit around at tables and inanely flip cardboard 'beer mats' against a backdrop of red flock wallpaper.

But if the environment itself were not depressing enough, then the level of interaction is enough to have any right thinking citizen weeping. F2Fers talk about football, what they had for dinner and that bloke in the office, over and over again. Gone is the rich debate, the informed discussion - here there is no recourse to wikipedia, instead interlocutors call upon a mythical 'bloke in the pub told me' as their sole source of fact.

Even more worrying we seem to be abandoning our cultural history of considered debate. In a F2F setting there is no time for reflection, the imperative is always upon the immediate. the sound-bite, as if the motto were 'say anything rather than be silent'. I don't know about you, but I was always brought up to believe that taking your time to reflect, research and compose your response was the best way to proceed.

Experts warn that f2fing could damage our communication skills (photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/74321115@N00/4219119825/)

Another disturbing factor is the drastic pruning of social relationships. Having developed skills at maintaining a complex set of relationships that are not limited by geography, time or demographics, the F2Fers now find themselves only able to be 'friends' (they have misappropriated the Facebook term) with people they can meet at a set time in a set location. Psychologists believe that this contraction to a restricted set, what is being termed the Dunbar number, will severely limit the capacity for social growth and innovation.

When we think about the great bloggers of the past, such as Montaigne, we can ask where are the great bloggers amongst the F2F set? They are almost entirely consumed with 'chatting' with people in cafes and bars. Would Montaigne have written so many thoughtful blog posts if he had spent all his time sipping lattes? I think the answer is no.

But all this might be dismissed as the ravings of an old misery, which is fine, but the implications could be far more sinister. No less a scientific dignitary than Baroness Brownhouse has recently decried the rise in F2F popularity, stating that 'it is a fact that less online interaction will rewire these kids brains resulting in them being less capable of processing complex information. By tweeting to 2 or 3 people I know that restricting your social field to those you can meet on a real time basis reduces an individual's neurological capacity for reflection, empathy and social understanding. Fact. Fact. Fact.'

Lastly, this F2F phenomena has seen a rise in a new, voodoo form of economics and publishing, where instead of gathering the inputs from everyone and allowing the best to rise to the surface, contributions are 'filtered'. This has led to paper based productions, labelled 'newspapers' being passed around for money. The so called writers (termed 'journalists') of these, don't contribute their ideas or opinions based on beliefs or knowledge, but rather are led by the business motivations of the newspaper owner. In one story I heard, a sinister underground figure known only as 'Murderok' owned several 'newspapers' and made the journalists write what he wanted. And yet the F2Fers proclaim this as a form of freedom because it allows for journalistic privilege! What happened to the wisdom of the crowds?!

So, while new blog darlings rush to embrace the F2F rebellion and abandon their twitter accounts for Starbucks loyalty cards, and reject considered thought in favour of inane blatherings, I'll stick to what has worked fine for the past few hundred years. As Shakespeare posted, 'I blog, therefore I am.'

Eduflow

I recently signed up for the new music service Mflow. It works like this: You find people to follow, like in any social network, you can play 30 seconds of a track, and you then flow it, which means it will turn up in your followers' inboxes. They can play the full track, but only once. If they choose to purchase it, then as the person who flowed it (I guess we can't use the term 'flower') you get a percentage in revenue.

As a music service I found it a bit frustrating - only being able to play 30 seconds of a track, and then only play those in your inbox once seems limiting. This would have been a good idea before the arrival of Spotify, but not now. But like many new services it maybe takes a time to realise how to use it. If one has a good set of people you are following, then it isn't about hearing the same track again, but have a continual stream of music - a sort of friend-filtered radio. Whether there is sufficient incentive for people to be continually flowing music though is another matter.

Their model is interesting on a couple of fronts I think, and also relevant to education. Some time ago I posted how Last.FM could be applied to an educational setting and you can see the same with Mflow. 

The first point of interest is the manner in which they have tried to formalise, or seperate out, the social filter function into a specific app. Having your network as a filter for music is something many of us already do with Twitter/Facebook combined with other services such as Blip.fm. But a continual flow of music recommendations in these general social spaces can be annoying. So for areas of particular interest, we might see more specific social recommendation/filtering services. We will have a default, general social network, and then a set of specialist ones for areas of interest. And education/learning might well be one such area. I suppose you could argue that delicious, or tumblr, or digg are already 'Flows' for content, but a more specialised educational one around subject areas with an OER focus might work.

The second point is the business model one - by getting a cut of purchases from items you have recommended Mflow hopes to incentivise some of the social recommending many of us do anyway. This will be interesting to watch - does have money attached mean that people try to get as many followers as possible, but this in turn devalues their relevance, meaning people will unfollow. Does it allow for very specialised recommenders, who spend more time finding music and are therefore worth following (in the same way that people play others to build up their avatars in virtual worlds). In an educational context, what might the impact of financial incentives be on a social learning model? Could you effectively recompense people for finding stuff, or is it just support and bespoke guidance that people pay for?

In conclusion then, I'm not convinced by Mflow as a music channel, but I am always intrigued when companies attempt to construct new business models and approaches which seem to take the internet and social media as their starting point, rather than a nuisance they wish would disappear.

The future of ed - my contribution

George Siemens and Dave Cormier are running an open course on the Future of Education. They have asked for contributions on this topic, so my musical slideshare is below. As well as the various angles you might expect, I think the answer is the presentation itself - when you think about why have I created a presentation for two people I have never met, on a course I won't teach on? The answers are because it's easy, because I have a social connection, and because I think it's fun (and there's probably a bit of ego in there too). And as I say at the end, that we can do this is kind of amazing isn't it?

So here is my contribution, I'm sure they'd like yours too:

Future of Education

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

Is public engagement an old media concept?

"In many ways the Roman Forum was a bit like a Lady Gaga concert..."

The OU hosted an event today, in collaboration with the BBC and the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement called 'Engaging citizens: media, research and the public'. It was an interesting day with presentations from the excellent Mary Beard, the BBC's Martin Davidson and Tristram Hunt from Queen Mary's. All the speakers were engaging and talked about the relationship between academics and media and some of the tensions and benefits collaboration brought.

In the panel session the issue of public engagement and particularly reach came up, and how could we get to 'non-BBC' audiences. Mary Beard gave a good answer, saying that she is a Classicist, she usually speaks to a hundred or so people, if she can make a programme that reaches thousands, then that's a win, and she'd 'worry about their postcodes' later. Which is I think the right attitude, no matter what you do, not everyone is going to be interested in classical history. Tristram Hunt used a quote from Bush's presidential campaign, that of 'the soft bigotry of low expectations', in this context to suggest that we dumb down or transform content to meet a middle class perception of the needs of others, only succeeding in patronising them.

But what all of this set me thinking was that the whole concept of 'public engagement' seems very rooted in traditional media. It has as its assumption a control of what is 'put out there' and thus a need to ensure that it meets the needs of the public. Public engagement becomes an issue because of economics - it costs lots of money to make traditional broadcast and so you have to a) demonstrate value for money by engaging 'the public' and b) need to meet as many different audiences with the same piece of content as possible.

If we switch to a new media (I know,I know - when will it stop being new?), then these two restrictions disappear, or diminish anyway. This is particularly true if we adopt a 'low friction' model of production from academic activity - we make slidecasts of talks, video interviews, lectures, podcasts, blog posts and put papers up online. Any one piece of output is not likely to engage all of the public, but some will, and they will engage small, interested groups. 

This is classic Long Tail distribution - lots of content, each piece of which appeals to only a few individuals, but the cumulative effect is that of engagement. And academic work produces lots of content - it can almost be seen as a Long Tail content production system. This view may also remove some of the tensions in the academic - broadcast relationship: there is no requirement to appeal to a mass audience.

There will undoubtedly still be a place for academics who are good on TV and radio, but this provides an alternative view of public engagement. If we were to think of how you could get better public engagement around this type of content then the focus would shift - it might not be about content but about tools, or promotion, or community.  

What might cuts really mean for higher ed

John Naughton pointed me at this piece in the London Review of Books by John Lanchester on the great British economy disaster, which is long and thoughtful. Not to mention depressing and scary.

He covers the political and economic repercussions of the proposed cuts, and points out that the reason both main parties are being unspecific about cuts is because they will be so dramatic as to be 'electoral suicide' to spell out. Here he is at his scariest:

"Both parties have said that they will ring-fence spending on health, education and overseas development. Plug in those numbers and we are looking at cuts everywhere else of 16 per cent...

Cuts of that magnitude have never been achieved in this country. Mrs Thatcher managed to cut some areas of public spending to zero growth; the difference between that and a contraction of 16 per cent is unimaginable...

the guesstimate for the cuts, if the ring-fencing is enforced, is from 18 to 24 per cent. What does that mean? According to Rowena Crawford, an IFS economist, quoted in the FT: ‘For the Ministry of Defence an 18 per cent cut means something on the scale of no longer employing the army.’ The FT then extrapolates:

"At the transport ministry, an 18 per cent reduction would take out more than a third of the department’s grant to Network Rail; a 24 per cent reduction is about equivalent to ending all current and capital expenditure on roads. At the Ministry of Justice an 18 per cent reduction broadly equates to closing all the courts, a 24 per cent cut to shutting two-thirds of all prisons."

This is scary stuff. The problem is that an 18 percent cut is not distributed evenly. There are certain fixed overhead regardless of the size: you still need a central administration, IT systems, etc. And only politicians believe that this size of cut can be made by 'efficiency savings'. A degree of waste is inevitable in any system, as comedian David Mitchell argues in this soapbox:

If we accept Lanchester and the FT's arguments about the impact of these cuts then what might this mean in Higher Education terms? If the quote about no longer employing the army is right, then we can work out a percentage of the actual closure required to meet an 18 percent cut. There are 187,210 regular forces, of which the Army accounts for 105,500 - a whopping 56%. There are also 40,780 reserves, 105,270 cadets plus 86,970 MoD civilians. Let's say, for the sake of a rough calculation that these extras, which total 233,020 operate at half the cost of the full time regulars (this is probably overestimating and includes 53,190 Army cadets), so we'll halve the number (116,510) to give an Armed Forces total of 303,720. The Army proportion then comes down to around 35%. 

Obviously there are equipment costs associated with these, which are considerable in the Armed Forces, but we can assume that by saying 'lose the army' the FT commentator is including these and we could make a rough comparison with capital costs in Higher education. To effect a loss of that proportion in Higher Education would mean one or more of the following:

• Loss of all research only staff (according to HESA), and that would only give you 22%
• The Closure of all Welsh and Scottish Universities (actually because of devolution this would work out differently, but as a measure, this would account for only 16% of total students)
• Closure of all Russell Group universities (actually this only gives you around 20% savings, so you'd need to combine it with the above maybe).
• Removal of all (undergraduate and postgraduate) part-time study programmes (gives you 34% reduction in student numbers, but probably not equal reduction in costs).

I fully accept that these figures would be swayed by many different factors - for instance the Russell Group universities get a large proportion of their funding from other means such as benefactors, research, tuition fees, etc. 

The overall point I am trying to make here though is that when people talk about 18% cuts, these are not merely belt-tightening exercises. In order to realise those types of cuts you actually have to lose more staff, and make deeper cuts because there are residual overheads in the system. And cuts of this magnitude are unprecedented and when you put them into the kind of context we see above (can you really imagine closing all Russell Group universities?) then the scale of the problem becomes apparent.

I don't have any solutions (except don't do it), but I know we are in for tough times ahead...

Call for papers - you know you want to

I am editing a special issue of the RUSC (a journal from the University of Catalonia) with George Siemens. The Special Issue is concerned with the Impact of Social Networks on Teaching and Learning. The language of the special issue is English. George has posted the details here. The topics we want to address are:

1. The role of the educator in social networks
2. Adaptation of learning theories for digital environments
3. Systemic change in education in response to affordances of social networks
4. Social network analysis in courses and learning environments
5. Mobile devices in social learning
6. Personal learning environments and networks
7. Learning design - methods and models of designing for social networks
8. The value of openness in learning
9. Next-generation social technologies
10. Scholarship and peer review in online social networks
11. Blending virtual and physical worlds - location-based services
12. Self-formed learning support networks

The deadline is 30th June and the journal is open.

So, if you've got a 6000 word paper you're burning to write in one of these areas, and don't want to submit it to one of those nasty, evil closed journals, then come to us. We will also be badgering inviting some people to write chapters, so if you know us, it might be a good time to take a holiday.

Openness as economic strategy

To borrow from Douglas Adams, this is the fourth in my trilogy of OER related posts. 

In the last one, I stated some of the issues for OER (as I'd been forced to address them for a debate). Patrick McAndrew gave a good rebuttal to most of these in his post, which I'd pretty much agree with. His response to my first point about sustainability was the strongest I think, where he argues:

"pricing OER as if it was a completely separate activity makes no more sense than if we started to cost giving a lecture as if that was all a “lecturer” did. Rather working with OER has an impact across many aspects of work, if you stop counting it as a *separate* activity and see being open alongside other things you do the extra cost becomes more reasonable"

What Patrick touches upon is that the best argument for (or defense of) OERs is a strategic, economic one. We can all agree to the altruistic, common good, ones but there are many things it would be good, or nice, for society to practice, that doesn't mean they will. So, openness and OERs need to move away from 'social good' as their main argument (which is not to say it isn't important, and for instance, when making appeals to public money is a very strong card to play). Rather like moves to make people more green and energy efficient, the general benefits are only one strategy - it is when this is combined with individual benefit that we see large uptake (the 'if you can't be green, be mean' line of argument, because energy efficiency is cost effective).

What then are the economic benefits of a general policy of openness in education?

• Publishing costs - this report, partly by JISC, indicates that an open access policy, where the research funders pay for publication and the material is then available to all, would save UK universities €480 annually, by not paying publishers to have access to their material.
• Courses - the degree of economic benefit in using OERs will vary depending on the extent of online material, what the teaching load is, etc. But this blog post breaks down some costs, and for example, at Harvard, 'Instruction' counts for 28% of expenditure (is this teaching?). In Washington they have 25% allocated to this, which comes out at $824M per year. So, if a 10% saving could be made by the use of OER, that's $82M a year. In the UK the spend is apparently £4.7 billion on teaching. Now you don't have to do OER to use OER, but it is probably the most effective way to get your faculty to engage with it. As with open access publishing, you do it, and you benefit by it.
• Recruitment - this is a large expenditure also. I couldn't find any recent figures, but in 1995 UK Universities were spending £14M on advertising, while this article says US colleges spent $2,000 per student to recruit in 2007. An open approach to content creation does a lot of this advertising and recruitment for you. And if it's a by-product of your teaching and research, then it's (almost) free.
• Impact and engagement - in case you hadn't heard, impact is where it's at now. The REF is big on impact (although small on actually counting anything new towards impact). As with recruitment, impact can cost a lot - employing media specialists to plant stories, spending time doing the keynote circuit, creating professional promotional material, etc. A lot of impact can be the result of good scholarly work - Einstein's papers didn't need a PR agent after all, but there is also a game to be played around impact which is partly controlled by the broadcast agenda. As we've seen in many other spheres, the internet bypasses much of this control structure. If I say to you 'Michael Wesch' then you may well think 'Kansas State University'. This university wasn't high on my recognition list previously, but the profile of Wesch has put it there, and at comparatively low cost.
• Protection - one of the arguments against openness I often hear is that of 'what if someone pinches my stuff'. I think the opposite can be true - openness is its own security. If someone pinches your stuff then if it has been out in the open, someone else is likely to spot this and alert you or the relevant body. The recent 'climategate' affair would, I think' have been avoided by a more open approach to research, and you have to think how much has now been spent in trying to tidy up after it. As a colleague of mine often says 'sunlight is the best disinfectant'.
• User testing - a project I was involved in once went for a hush-hush approach to development for commercial reasons. In the end I think it ended up costing money, because specific user testers had to be recruited. If you have an open approach then not only can you get people to try stuff out as you go along, but you can also develop incrementally. 
• Research - as with teaching and publishing, an open approach to research, particularly the sharing of data can reduce much of the duplication in efforts, without the need for time-consuming memorandums of understanding. There will be research that is commercially sensitive, but probably not as much as many researchers have tended to believe over the years. According to the REF, in England £1.5Bn of research funding was allocated in 2009. While any savings would have to be balanced against profits from commercial exploitation arising from that research, even a 1% saving arising from an open policy would give £15M annually in England alone (as well as all the other benefits).

Any figures above are subject to argument, but I think we could begin to make a very solid case for the economic benefits to any institution of an open approach (we'd need to define what we meant by that of course). In fact, I'd say it looks like a pretty good research project.