The Ed Techie

Be the Sat Nav

Our metaphors for human behaviour are often informed by technology, and the metaphors we adopt play an important role in how we see the world. Lakoff and Johnson argue that "If... our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor."

But can you consciously choose metaphors to shape your own behaviour? This is part of the argument of talking therapies, that you change your interaction with the world by the way you frame it conceptually. All of which is trying to provide some academic justification for a small idea in a small post...

I was pondering this the other day, when I got lost and my sat nav was patiently trying to guide me somewhere, although I thought it had got it wrong. The beauty of the sat nav is that it has no memory. It doesn't care that it told you turn around when possible, or that it said turn left and you turned right. It calculates purely from the present. It doesn't give up in a huff and say "well, if you're just going to ignore me, what's the point?" This is reassuring when you're driving, you need to know it doesn't matter what has gone before, it can navigate you anywhere from this point.

In life, having memory is generally a good thing (we wouldn't have evolved it otherwise). But there are times when being able to 'be the sat nav' and take it forward only from the present and forget the past is useful. Personally, I'm a person who can bear grudges. There is a blogger I still haven't forgiven because they once quoted me and inserted [sic]. They were correct to do so, I had made a grammatical error, but I interpret [sic] as [I'm smugly superior to this person]. I should let it go. I should be the sat nav.

So, if you find a relationship is blocked because you can't forgive a minor misdemenour (I'm not suggesting you should forget if someone has stolen your car and emptied your bank account), then breathe deep, say the mantra 'I am the sat nav' and then say 'at the next interaction, go straight on'. Or something equally zen like.

PS - I also don't forgive people who don't say thankyou when you let them through in traffic, who don't put the 'next customer' indicator down for you in supermarket queues, who use 'literally' incorrectly... ok, it's going to take some practice.

A technology extinction event?

(file this post under frivolous banter)

In a post the other day I was positing that the declaration of "X is dead" is usually a good indicator of a charlatan/self-promoter. I suggested that technologies rarely die, but find more nuanced, specialist audiences. Some people commented that technologies NEVER die. 

So, just for discussion - is the typewriter a contender for a technology that will actually die. The last one in Britain was produced yesterday. I know there are some existing users, writers often, who still like to craft their work on a typewriter. But this is a habit, and a declining market. This is very distinct I would suggest, from a new audience discovering a preference for the old technology, as we've seen with analogue cameras and vinyl records. These typewriter fans would suggest otherwise. I think people can make a case for preferring a typewriter to work on (it makes you think more about what you commit to paper, it forces a linear sequence rather than cut and paste, etc), but I think these only apply if you started out on a typewriter, they're not compelling enough to make you want to use one over the convenience of a word processing package. Anyone who has used a typewriter for typing a long document on will know these romantic preferences soon wear thinner than your correction fluid.

Then there's typewriters as objets d'art, which I think is valid, they are quite exquisite machines. But admiring them in a museum is different from them being used in anger.

So what do people reckon, will the typewriter die with its existing set of fans, or will it find a new existence with a niche audience?

 

Treading the integrity line

I had some media training last week, as part of the OU's REF build up. I've authored one of our impact case studies (on Open Education). The idea is that should we be asked to appear on radio then we're prepared to deal with the four minute interview on our subject.

I was a bit cynical going in to it, but it was a useful and fun session, practising being interviewed and getting your point across to a general audience. It's probably good practice for all academics to do, regardless of whether they'll ever be on the radio (and with a voice like mine, I hope not for everyone's sake). 

I made the point that academics often come across awkwardly in interviews because they are caught in a somewhat schizophrenic situation. They are trying to speak simultaneously to two audiences. There is the general audience who doesn't want to know the subtle details, doesn't care about the history and framing work and hasn't got time to consider the complications - they want to know the key details and what's relevant to them. But at the same time the academic is aware that their peers may well be listening. They could come across as trying to claim more for themselves than is the case, of overstating the implication of their research and of grossly simplifying the complexity of the situation. 

The media advisers said that the best academics in the mass media tended to ignore this second audience and just focus on the mass one. This is indeed a skill, and there are academics who do it well, making their subject interesting without sacrificing too much. And then there are academics who clearly become enamoured of the mass media attention and trade in all intergrity in order to become the person who makes a media friendly statement. For instance there's Dr Cliff Arnall who every year does the rounds with the Blue Monday nonsense. 

I think it would be easy to eschew all mass media, but it can be done right - I just don't know that I could do it right. Which is why this blogging and online stuff suits me better - you get to explain it when you want to, and on your terms. Plus, here everyone's friendly, right?

The key I guess is in maintaining an integrity you feel comfortable with. And integrity always brings to mind the story I heard about Nick Cave who turned down a substantial sum from Gap for his music to be used in an advert. He reasoned:

"I get letters from people telling me they got married to The Ship Song, or that they buried their best friend to a Into My Arms, and I don't want them to look at the TV and see that they buried their friend to Cornetto or something. I feel some sense of responsibility about that, even though they wave enormous sums of money at you."

So here's some Nick Cave:

Hanging with the MOOC boys

Now that MOOCtober has passed, I think it's safe to talk about MOOCs again. 

As I've mentioned I'm experimenting next year with running my block of the Masters Course in Online and Distance Education as an open course. I've wanted to do this for ages, but always been blocked, but now that MOOCs are on everyone's radar, lots of elements have fallen into place that make it possible. This might be a beneficial consequence of the MOOC hype - they create an environment in which experimentation in open courses is encouraged.

My course will run for 6 weeks and is part of the longer 20 week course, H817 Openness and Innovation in elearning. It'll be interesting to see how making part of a longer course open works. My part is on Open Education, looks at OERs, MOOCs, pedagogy and technology.

As part of it I recorded an interview with Dave Cormier and George Siemens talking about MOOCs. We cover the initial idea behind MOOCs, the term itself, the new MOOCs and future directions. It also has an affordances klaxon. I thought I'd share it here too, enjoy! (Thanks to George and Dave for sparing the time for it).

The X is dead test, or why you shouldn't trust simple answers

Many of you will be familiar with the (itself overhyped) Gartner Hype curve. I'm not going to get into its scientific validity here, but I think it has resonance as people recognise their own relationship with technology in it. There are more sophisticated technology adoption theories, but let's go with this one for now. 

Back when we used to use the term 'web 2.0' without embarrassment, many of us were hyping it up. I'm guilty of this as much as anyone. At the time, the combination of user generated content, wide connnectivity, social networking, mobile devices seemed to open up possibilities. I still find it amazing that I have such a rich, global network of peers, all of whom are smarter than me, and most of whom I haven't met. I would arguse that this optimism, and slight discarding of critical powers we felt wasn't a failing however, it was a necessity. By engaging in this new world whole-heartedly one could really get the benefits and also potentially shape the possible futures we were envisaging.

Inevitably some of that glossy holiday romance wears off. This isn't a bad thing - as Clay Shirky is fond of saying, a technology becomes really interesting when it becomes invisible. Social networks, user generated content - all these things are more interesting in social terms now they're part of everyday life than when they were a niche club. But our attitudes shift also, and it now becomes appropriate to have a more questioning stance, as these very tools become used by a much bigger audience and for different means. Gardner Campbell covers this in detail with his refrain "That is not what I meant at all"

What is now required from us educators is to tread a fine line. It is easy to become cynical, to dismiss all new innovations and bemoan the good old days when blogging was a really exciting, new world. The danger there is that we become the very people resistant to new ideas that we used to bemoan. And we miss genuine opportunities. On the contrary side, we need to avoid simple, easy solutions. We know that technology, education and society is more nuanced than simple slogans allow.

So, if anyone states any of the following now (ahem, I can let them off if they did it a while ago), they are revealing either that they are naive, or worse, a charlatan:

• Specifying a particular technology is dead - actually technologies rarely die (some do, eg the fax), their monopoly is lost, and they become specialised, adapted, mutated. Think of radio, or books. Merely declaring something to be dead is usually a precursor to selling its replacement.
• Disrupting education - I've moaned about the "education is broken" meme, and Audrey Waters has a thoughtful piece on the simplistic narrative around education has remained unchanged for 200 years. As Brian Lamb comments:

I think the next time I read about somebody "disrupting" education, I'm gonna throw a keg party in their office.
— Brian Lamb (@brlamb) November 5, 2012

• There's nothing new here - the reverse of these is to dismiss everything. We've seen all this before, there's nothing new here so no need to change my approach.

So, I'll make a plea here - we like simple answers, we like people who give us simple answers. They're sexy. They're convenient. They're tweetable. But life isn't like that, and actually the messy, nuanced, complex picture is more interesting. Be suspicious of those oh so sweet tasting simple answers on either side of the technology divide.