The Ed Techie

Simpsonize yourself

(via John Connell) Burger King offer the ability to Simpsonize yourself. You upload a photo, do some adjustments and hey presto, there's a Simpsons character that doesn't look much like you. But it is fun. Here's me:

Whoever devised this for BK deserves to have their meal maxed - this is exactly the kind of marketing that works online. It's fun, irresistible, quick and very viral. Look - even grumpy old professors do it and then blog about it. Whether it will make me buy a whopper is another question though.

Live Earth - wrong medium, right message

I'm sure a lot of people thought it was great, but for me Live Earth was a disaster. It's not that getting the message across isn't an admirable thing, I'm not a global warming denier or anything, but the format was all wrong. Here's why:

• It's a complex issue. Rock stars and comedians don't do complex. When we are told that the groups are being briefed backstage on being green you can't help wonder what right they've got to be supporting a cause they don't practice. I know we're obsessed by celebrity, but some things are better left to others.
• It seemed to undermine itself. I'm sure they recycled, did carbon offsetting etc, but the whole thing reminded of a sketch with Harry Enfield playing the self-important DJ Dave Smash. He brags at one point 'a bunch of us took our helicopters up and flew them around London for an hour. We raised over fifty quid for green charities.' (this is from memory, so is not verbatim)
• A muddled message. What was the message exactly? Was it about global warming specifically? Or recycling more? Or just anything green? You can criticise the original Live Aid, but it did work as a spectacle because it had a clear message.
• It ain't rock n roll. For Live Aid, rock stars could get angry about people dying, but saying 'don't leave your TV on standby' just isn't rock n roll. One almost expected Iggy Pop to come on stage and start singing 'I've got a bag, bag, bag, bag for life.'

The common response is that if it makes one person switch off their TV, it's worthwhile. But I think there are better ways to get that message across, for example making 'An Inconvenient Truth' compulsory viewing in all schools. I also fear it might have had a negative effect. If you were unsure about it all before, seeing comedians sneering, and bands admitting they didn't do anything would be all the justification you needed to do nothing.

The Internet - filed

We (IET) are moving to a posh new building soon so there is some office clearing going on. I was looking at my shelves yesterday and realised that I have about 15 lever arch files which I brought over from the Technology faculty when I joined IET five years ago. I have never opened them. Like many people I just don't do any paper filing any more. In a technological  reversal for me things don't really exist if I haven't got an electronic copy. Sending me something on paper is nice, but it'll only end up in the bin.  For instance I booked a hotel in Sydney recently (for a trip in October). I had to do it by phone. I then felt uncomfortable that I didn't have an electronic confirmation, so emailed them to get one. Booking by phone used to be the norm, but actually feels vague and nebulous now because I can't save it anywhere.

Anyway, looking at my files I had to smile at one I had started when I joined the OU around 1995. On the spine I had written 'The Internet'. There, that's that covered then. On opening it there was lots of papers on how TCP/IP and HTTP actually worked. For some reason this seemed important then. There is probably a term for this progression as technologies become accepted and more robust. When they are new, there is a need to understand the nuts and bolts, partly because the early adopters are interested in how it works, and partly because you have to understand how it works because it goes wrong so often. As it becomes more robust then the level of understanding moves up through layers of abstraction.

In defence of Cicero

I watched the first part of the second series of Rome on BBC last night. As I've mentioned before, my favourite Roman (there's a question they never ask pop stars or footballers - favourite meal 'Spaghetti bolognaise', 'Favourite Roman' 'errrm') is Cicero. I think the series does him a disservice and portrays him as rather slimy, and driven only by ambition (Paul Levinson agrees). Now, admittedly he was ambitious and rather ambiguous too in some of his actions, but I've always interpreted him as having the Republic as a concept as his main driving belief. This sometimes forced him in to some uncomfortable alliances, but he was willing to compromise for the good of the republic overall. I admired that, and the fact that he was the academic amongst the great Romans.

I'm probably reading too much in to this, but I'll try it out as a hypothesis - I wonder if the portrayal of the academic rather than the military as slimy has anything to do with it being an HBO joint production. In the current political climate in the US, it seems that academics are rather mistrusted. Making some dodgy connections here, but my feeling of why the neo-cons went to war in Iraq was borne partly out of their inherent distrust of academics, hence they didn't trust or want to hear the complex picture painted by Hans Blix, but instead wanted a simple, decisive strategy. This rather ignored the complexities of the situation in Iraq as is now all too apparent. I'm guessing Bush is more of a Mark Antony kind of guy...

What are you an analogue snob about?

I was contacted yesterday by someone writing a piece for The Times on parental snobbery. They had come across my posting on My Own Leisure Snobbery and wanted to know if they could use it. By the way, having just done two blogging talks this was a minor example of the economics of reputation concept - this person would never have contacted me normally. In my response I mentioned that I was an occassional anaologue snob, and that being an analogue snob was a sure giveaway of being a digital immigrant, to use Prensky's term.

I recounted the story of when we were in a restaurant recently and my daughter and her cousin were swapping pictures via their Nintendo DSs. I used to be a bit judgemental about kids sitting there with gameboys, but that was before I had my own child, and I realised what a Godsend they were. There was a table behind us of older people who were casting disapproving looks at the children though for this blatant display of digitalness. It struck me that if the children were swapping pictures on bits of paper, then everyone would think it was sweet.

This made me reflect on what I was an analogue snob about. Not that much, but two things came to mind:

• Watches - I have an automatic with a glass back so you can see the movement, and I think it is a thing of wonder. It gains about 5 minutes a week and is much less reliable than a digital watch, but I have always felt proper watches should have a movement.
• Art - it's got to have paint, canvas and stuff you know?

Now I think these are justifiable snobberies, that in these cases analogue is simply better, but maybe not. For some people photography would be another case (not me, I'm a point and click merchant). So, what's the thing your an analogue snob about?

[Update - the piece in the Times by Michele Kirsch was published here, although it got rather trimmed down in favour of an advert apparently. Not a problem one has with blogging I will snootily point out]

My daughter's music - now with live playlist

In my earlier post on my daughter's playlist I wondered if there was a way of pulling the playlist in from iTunes. Of course there is, and of course Tony Hirst pointed me at it, but what was interesting was that actually I didn't even bother to look in iTunes. I think of Apple as such an obsessively proprietary organisation that they wouldn't bother to do something so open. So this is just by way of a test.

My daughter's music

My five year old daughter has her own playlist on iTunes. It is reasonably good:

• The Automatic - Monster
• Coldplay - Yellow
• Kanye West - Touch the Sky
• Madonna - Sorry
• The Blood Arm - Suspicious character
• Cliff Richard - Batchelor Boy
• The Feeling - Never be lonely
• Scissor Sisters - I don't feel like dancing
• JET - Are you gonna be my girl
• Just Jack - Starz in their eyes
• Kaiser Chiefs - Ruby
• Kooks - Naive
• The View - Same jeans

Is there a way of pulling in an iTunes playlist by the way? I don't want Tony Hirst to accuse me of being clunky again :)

You will notice the one fly in the ointment in the playlist - Cliff. She does love Cliff, and I had to endure 'Devil Woman' on repeat the other day. She will be very embarrassed about this one day.

I was thinking that when I was five I had a record of Pinky and Perky singing Somewhere over the rainbow and that was about it. I think her playlist demonstrates a few things. The first is the ubiquity of music - we will be in Tesco and she will hear the Kaiser Chiefs and say 'I love this!' The second is that music was probably more significant to my generation than it was to my parents, and so she has picked up on the stuff we listen to. The third thing is that the trend towards the song as granularity rather than the artist is already evident. (Bloody) Cliff aside she doesn't really like a particular artist, just songs and because we can access these immediately she builds up her playlist as she hears things, rather than having to go to a shop to get it (that already seems an age ago - 'I'm going in to town tomorrow to buy the new Clash album'). Lastly, there isn't much permanence to this - it will evolve and change. I should save, or burn it on to a CD - your first playlist now replaces your first bike as an artifact of nostalgia.

Cardiff the slow city

I live in Cardiff, which I think is a great city - it's the right size, it's got a strong identity, it's got good facilities, we have some great coastline nearby and the wonderful Brecon beacons behind us. It now turns out that it is also Britain's most laid back city. Some recent research has measured the pace at which people walk, which has increased by 10% over the past decade or so, but Cardiff came out as having the slowest walking pace. That's because we're not in a rush, we're enjoying ourselves. And it was also found to be a fairly honest city in a not very scientific study. But why am I telling you this? I don't want all you rushy types coming here and speeding it up...

Football commentators, elearning and the legitimacy deficit

There was much discussion last week about the BBC appointing its first female commentator on Match of the Day.  Rather predictably this assault on the last bastion of maleness caused some debate. The ant-argument seems to fall in to three camps:

i) She hasn't played the game and you need to have done so in order to be a good commentator. This is just plain wrong and like many fields confuses experience with critical prowess. Many good literary reviewers are not good authors and vice versa, the same goes for film, and most of the printed press in any sport. Indeed I have been rather disappointed with the rise of ex-players having a monopoly over punditry and analysis at the BBC. This is because a) they can't fight their way out of a cliche bag and b) they're often not removed enough from the sport to bring other insights. Sure, a commentator needs to be knowledgeable, but you can gain that from other means. After all, do most football fans think their own viewpoint is useless because they haven't played professionally?

ii) The female voice is not appropriate for football commentary. Hmmm, this one seems to have had too much of an airing, for example Irish-Le-Faux suggests "I don't think the female voice is equipped to commentate on football due to the high pitched nature of it". Now, obviously not all female voices are the same, but even if we accept there is general a higher pitch, this doesn't mean they are incapable of expressing excitement without screaming. I, like many footie fans, find the ranty-shouty type commentator pretty unbearable, for example Jonathan Pearce seems to reach a crescendo of excitement and volume while the team walk out of the tunnel and has nowhere left to go when things do exciting (not very likely with England playing, admittedly) without descending in to some guttural scream. Now maybe this gets at the primal appeal of sport for some people, and I accept people will have preferences, but to issue an edict against any female commentators seems ludicrous.

What all this reminded me of is the notion of a legitimacy deficit. Note that a legitimacy deficit doesn't have to be real (ie that female commentators are really not as good as men), but rather it just has to be perceived, either by the wider public or by the individual themselves (they think I'm not as good). Now legitimacy deficits are something I know about - I work for the Open University, which when it was founded had to overcome an enormous legitimacy deficit regarding the quality and validity of distance learning. I have been involved in the early adoption of e-learning, which again faced the same sorts of criticisms (indeed often the exact same ones, but with the words 'distance learning' replaced by 'e-learning' - and sometimes from distance educators!).  And I encounter the same sort of deficit with web 2.0 stuff now - e.g. it's not for education, it's just hype, what about the serious pedagogy?, etc.

One of the good things about a legitimacy deficit is that it often makes the person, group or organisation on the end of it work extra hard to overcome it. This has the result that their output is often better than the standard offering. For example, the OU's teaching quality is ranked in the top ten in the UK (although the downside is that having worked so hard to get this legitimacy it makes some people reluctant to risk it, and thus an element of risk aversion sets in). There are many examples of it in history - because of the rather dubious manner in which he inherited the title of emperor, Charlemagne suffered something of a legitimacy deficit which may have been the reason behind many of his cultural reforms, including the Carolingian Renaissance. Of course, the reaction to a legitimacy deficit can be negative also, particularly when it is to convince others of your legitimacy by strength (ahem, George Bush springs to mind).

In educational technology here is my 'legitimacy deficit' top ten:

1. Open educational resources - whether this approach is sustainable, desirable, viable, etc.
2. User generated content - need I say more? You know the arguments.
3. Social software - is this just for entertainment or serious education?
4. ePortfolios - an eportfolio based approach has enormous implications for institutions but whether it will be accepted by learners, universities and employers is up for debate.
5. Informal learning - communities of practice, open source activity, etc. How do we map this across and recognise it?
6. PLEs - I've covered this before.
7. VLEs - although pervasive you would have to say they haven't fully overcome the legitimacy deficit, and a lot of the criticism comes from e-learning advocates who feel they are just not up to the job.
8. e-learning - yes, it's still there, down four from last year.
9. Podcasts, wikis, blogs - okay, kind of covered user generated content but there is something about this group where the legitimacy deficit is about the validity of academic debate that takes place, and whether these are the new journals.
10. [Insert your own one here]

Being in the legitimacy deficit zone is a good place to be though - this is where the excitement is, so if you're involved in any of the above remember that such deficits can be overcome and the outcome is often all the better for having that struggle. And good luck Jaqui Oatley too!

Is marketing dead?

Chris Anderson posted on Google's attitude towards marketing, which was 'we know we're good, everyone will try us so don't do it.' I've been having a few discussions around marketing as part of the broadcast review, and how companies such as YouTube just completely ignore all the rules of marketing. Let's take adverts as the purest form of marketing (I know there are lots of other methods, but they are usually adverts dressed up), I see these as rather greedy chunks of resource. They don't do anything except say 'here I am, this is the product.' And they cost a lot of money to say this. If you take viral marketing in its proper sense, not in the 'marketing companies trying to do normal marketing in a viral way' sense, then it works because the resource does something. It entertains, it educates, it informs, it encourages dialogue, etc. Take YouTube - an advert for the site would be pretty pointless, but allowing people to actually share the content is powerful. A traditional marketing guy would never have understood that.

If one considers this in educational terms then perhaps the best form of marketing universities can do is to create educational content that is freely available. This then serves not one, but three functions:

i) It can be used by the university in its own courses.

ii) It fulfills an outreach/public good function as others can use it.

iii) It advertises the university.

Compare that with simply having an add that says 'gee it's fun to study at X' and I can see a time when traditional marketing begins to look like a shaky investment.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of those in marketing everywhere, I've never really understood it as an academic discipline either. This is after all a field whose Cistine Chapel is Gilette's 'Give away the razor, sell the blades' policy and whose Theory of Relativity is the rebranding of the viscosity of Heinz ketchup. I feel rather like marketing as Galbraith did of economic forecasting when he said "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."