The Ed Techie

It's kinda personal

Jim Groom and Tim Owens have been running a Domain of One's Own project at UMW. And to my delight they've kicked it off with a staff development program based around reading my book. I think all universities should do this!

You can see some of the posts here. As the author it's been very interesting to see some of the reactions from what I guess are atypical readers. I think most of the people who read my book are kind of interested in the subject, so there's an element of preaching to the converted (although I try not to do any preaching). But with Jim's faculty I guess they're people who wouldn't have read it. And the book brings out different concerns and reactions in them, many of which hadn't occurred to me. This going beyond your usual readership is a salutary lesson for any writer, and has made me rethink some of the way I write.

In his post Jim comments:

"I understand it would be impolitic for Martin to mention this in the book given his audience, but for me that is the real radical line of reasoning for open scholarship—a clear picture of just who the people behind the ideas ideas are, and what “such people” represent more tangibly as human beings."

I don't know about impolitic, I just forgot to mention it. Whenever I do sessions on social media for educators I always address this point. Getting the balance right is difficult. Jim is absolutely correct, it's the personal that leads to engagement, and this is a very different voice from the objective one of academic papers (which is not to say it's better or worse, just different). So you need to put an element of personal in there, the people I follow on blogs and twitter don't just broadcast cold ideas. But having said that, one of the mistakes I think people make when they first start blogging is to go too personal. I'm not particularly interested if you went to the cinema last night and the film was quite good and then you had a curry. 

So It's about that bridging between personal and professional. Now if you went to the cinema, and had a revelation about open access while watching a 3-D slasher movie, I'm interested. I think the personal element is essential in good online presence (but that doesn't mean I want to know when you've had an argument with your spouse). Which raises the question, are there some roles where it's effectively impossible to do good social media? I think it's very difficult to be a police officer or politician or senior manager online as you end up having to sanitise every output to the point where it becomes unengaging. If you don't there are people who will use it against you. So, as you go higher up the career ladder maybe effective online presence becomes more difficult.

In Amis's The Pregnant Widow the main character finds financial success but as soon as he does, his ability to write poetry dries up. You can't have both. Maybe that's the way it goes with social media.

 

Twitter is your IT support

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/7172953614/>

This post isn't intended as a criticism of anyone, rather an observation on a trend I've noticed from several others also. 

I'm running my block of the Masters course H817 as a MOOC. It'll start this March, and one of the things I wanted is a DS106 style blog aggregator. That is, I want the contributors to register their blog, and for posts they tag appropriately to repost automatically in the course blog.

Now, the sensible way to do this seems to be to install WordPress and use the FeedWordPress plug-in. For reasons I won't go in to, I haven't been able to get this done at the Open University, despite trying since last July. I've spoken to people at others unis and it isn't isolated to the OU, it seems to be this low-level, experimental type of IT support is increasingly difficult to find.

Do you know who I think the culprit is? The VLE. As universities installed VLEs they became experts at developing enterprise level solutions. This is serious business and I have a lot of respect for people who do it. The level of support, planning and maintenance required for such systems is considerable. So we developed a whole host of processes to make sure it worked well. But along the way we lost the ability to support small scale IT requests that don't require an enterprise level solution. In short, we know how to spend £500,000 but not how to spend £500.

With time pushing on, I got some local support in IET (thanks Will), and investigated the best options. It became clear that hosting externally would be the easiest option. I asked on Twitter who the best hosting solutions were and got a great set of responses. Alan Cann suggested siteground and sent me a friend's introduction offer, so I signed up with them. In 10 minutes I'd followed their WordPress installation, installed WP, found the FeedWordPress plug-in and installed that too. The blog is here: h817open.net

My next problem was to get registration to work. I looked at what DS106 have done, and in response to a request on Twitter, Alan Levine pointed me to this solution from Martha Burtis. That was a bit beyond my coding skills. So I created a simple Google Form and embedded it in my blog. I then asked Martin Hawksey if he knew how to take a Google form output and turn it into an OPML file as FeedWordPress allows you to create a list of syndicated sites from an OPML file. He pointed me to this service, which does just that.

He and Tony also suggested some solutions which will help with autodiscovery (ie finding the feed for the blog if someone just enters their main URL). Martin lists some options here. I haven't quite cracked this yet, so it needs people to enter their feed url, which isn't ideal, so I'll keep working on this.

So, I think I have a working solution. If you have time, could you try it for me by registering your blog here and then posting something which has the tag #h817open. Only posts with this tag should appear. You can just do a test post, but perhaps more interestingly you could respond to the idea of whether "openness has won" or not with a post "Openness has (hasn't) won because..."

This took me about an afternoon. The problem is that it's quite a flaky solution, the OPML service could disappear, I don't really know if it will work for all blogs, and there's no support. So it could go down and I've got no backup. More worryingly I am at the edge of my expertise here, so I can't really do much more. So a university supported proper grown-up solution would be preferable. On the other hand, one of the things I frequently say is that the best thing we can teach our students is how to be good members of a network. And this is a clear demonstration of why I believe that. I think this tension between the innovative possibilities of new technology and the understandably cautious nature of institutional IT services will mean that we'll all need to do more of this DIY tech set-up and experimentation. And the only way to do that is to have a good network who can help.

One last plea - I joked with Alan that I needed DS106 out of a box. I think I'm serious though - it would be great to have a step by step, idiots guide to installing and setting up a DS106-like environment. The rest of us don't have Alan and Jim's tech skills, so getting to the starting line is difficult. I know they'll say you should invent your own way, but they done so much great work that I don't think they realise just how much expertise they have. A simple installation that let the rest of us get started, would mean we could all go off in different directions then. So any of the DS106 crowd up for it? And I do mean a simple guide, it has to be Weller-proof.

 

VCR as formative technology

Having done a couple of DS106 radio shows with Jim Groom (which suffered rather from, erm, technical difficulties), the notion of the early video cassette recorder as a formative technology has emerged for me.

Here are some ways in which I think it was relevant:

It changed the film industry - home video was seen as a threat by the film studios back in the early 80s, with the fear that it would mean people would stop going to the cinema. This didn't happen, and gradually they realised that it was another very lucrative form of income. Many decent films got a second life on video, and an awful lot of crap ones went straight to it. Ironically, it is the protection of DVD rental and sales (the very things they fought against) that the film industry seeks to protect against the new interloper, the internet.

It created a new kind of aesthetics - this is my attempt at justifying my penchant for B-movie horror, but I think, that just as, say Dire Straits seemed made for CD, and Gladiator for DVD, so those 80s horror films such as The Evil Dead, The Thing and CHUD seemed to be the right mix of platform and content. Carpenter's The Thing was panned when it was released as being over the top, but I think he understood the type of aesthetics that worked on VHS.

It acted as a social object - I was one of the first kids to have a VHS, and so people would regularly convene round my house to watch films. We developed a library, a shared repertoire of dialogue, and a culture around the movies that we could watch repeatedly. We still went to the cinema, but being to see your collection of movies over and over, created a different type of interaction between school-friends.

It gave the viewer control - this was the main thing, it first of all liberated us from TV schedules or cinema listings - you could rent the film you wanted and watch it when you determined. But also it gave us control over the viewing process. You could fast forward, rewind, slow mo and pause. There were many films which we would skip to favourite scenes in (eg fight scenes in The Warriors), and particular ones we would watch in slow-motion (the head exploding in Scanners). This meant we were watching films in an entirely different way from that which was intended. 

[UPDATE] The birth of read/write - I didn't include this originally, but Scott's comment below set me thinking. I didn't do much creating with the VCR, as cameras were still expensive, but on reflection, Scott is right to highlight this. Even by recording from the TV you began to make your own creation - for instance, I had one tape for artists on Top of the Pops, so over the years created my own compilation (I wish I still had that tape now). And in the late 80s a bunch of us hired a camera for a weekend and made a video for a friend's 21st, with a bunch of comedy clips and film pastiches. So, even if we didn't do much, this technology marked a significant change - that from consumer to producer, which is one that has come to define the modern age.

I think all of these have resonance with what we are seeing now with internet culture - the threat of new technology, loss of control, greater choice and democratisation of process. The home computer is often cited as the influential technology for today, but I reckon the VHS home recorder was more significant. It taught us how to play around, reinterpret and take control. And it had great big buttons you could operate with your toes.

(don't watch this clip of you're a bit squeamish)

Bavathursdays, messiness is part of the plan

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbanislands/3716274762/ by Viqi French>

Last night I joined Jim Groom for a live session on DS106 Radio. The idea was to chat about 80s b-movies, an interest we have in common and see where it went. It's fair to say it went all over the shop, but was really fun from our end anyway (I'm not sure how much fun it was for the listener). But on the basis that it's through playing and doing fun stuff that you actually learn, we're going to have a go again. Next time we'll try and get others involved and have a focus around a particular theme or film I think.

I created some fake adverts for a VLE/LMS sponsor, ZombieBoard ("Because learning is too serious to have fun"), which are here:

 

MW80sBrit- zombie1

MW80sBrit- zombie2

MW80sBrit- zombie3

If you want to hear two people struggling with technology, winging it a bit, and then being self-indulgent about John Carpenter films, then you can listen to the whole show here:

 

Download Bavathursdays-ep1.mp3