The Ed Techie

The Podstars lessons

I mentioned a while back that I was running an internal project called 'Podstars'. This ties into the whole digital scholarship/new digital outputs agenda. The title is somewhat misleading since the aim of the project was not to create online broadcast celebrities, but rather to raise the profile of producing new kinds of stuff for academics.

In the project we asked for volunteers, and then gave Flip cams to 16 academics. We got them together for an initial meeting, showed them the basic video editing software, talked through what they wanted to do and showed some good examples of videos and tools they might use. We then had a mid-project meeting where we reviewed contributions and discussed any issues, and then a final meeting. In the mean time we had a wiki to share contributions and ad-hoc support as needed. 

The project has now ended and we've done some evaluation, so I thought I'd share some thoughts. You can see some of the outputs here.

Feedback

The feedback was almost entirely positive. Of course, the group was made up of volunteers, but they all found the project useful and plan to take on aspects of it further. Below are a couple of representative quotes:

"It has been immensely useful to my teaching. I had created a great deal of AV and online content before, but this was all OU (or BBC) branded and I was simply not aware of all the free resources available now. The course really opened my eyes to the possibilities outside formal OU systems."

"Amazingly helpful. It gave me confidence to get on and try it"

"I'm now thinking about ways to extend use of video in my research and teaching"

"I learnt a lot about the options available for packaging and disseminating my research results. This was certainly a very useful project for me."

In general people favoured the open nature of the project (rather than giving them a set direction to film), found the wiki a mixed experience, didn't think a buddy project would work, the time required was more than expected, it was enjoyable and they felt that the number of meetings, and length of project, was about right.

Takeaway messages

Obviously with such a limited and self-selecting cohort this is not a representative sample, but I'd draw some tentative messages from this pilot study, or at least things to discuss.

• The legitimisation of 'playing' - most participants had thought about creating video before, and kept blogs or had specific projects, but had never quite found the time to make that commitment. By signing up to the project this both legitimised it in their own minds (and that of colleagues/managers) and also provided a motivation to engage.
• The switch to producer from consumer - this is small, but significant. We asked people to upload to YouTube, and although most had viewed lots of videos, none (I think) had produced their own. Once this switch has been made it will be interesting to see if it sticks.
• Different formats - although we started the project around Flip cams, I also introduced people to Xtranormal, Slideshare and Animoto, with the challenge 'you can produce something in 15 minutes'. Some participants preferred these other tools, and all could see value in having a mix. Exposure to the variety of tools (and see below, their ease of use), was a significant gain for many of the volunteers.
• An appreciation of how easy it has become - as you can see from a couple of the quotes above it was a mild revelation to many participants to realise how easy the tools are to use. This included the Flip cam and editing software (nearly all participants soon wanted to move beyond the limitations of the default Flip software for editing), and also the additional tools and services such as YouTube, Slideshare and Xtranormal. In fact the most cumbersome tool was probably the wetpaint wiki we used to share content. This is something I often stress in workshops - we've passed a threshold in the ease of use of multimedia but a lot of people don't know that yet. Seeing how easy it was to create content for themselves which can be used for dissemination, research or teaching was quite liberating.
• Context and framing is important - when you have your own blog, it is easy to construct the academic context around an artefact, eg I can embed a slidecast and then write a commentary around what I was hoping to achieve with it. Although we could have done this with the wiki, it didn't work well for the participants and thus some reported that they felt their artifacts were rather left floating. This ties in with another point which is about having a recognised output route. In the next iteration I think I'll create a podstars blog where people can then construct text around each entry.
• A non-project project - in my last post I proposed that the type of web 2.0/social media innovation organisations might want to explore doesn't fit easily into a conventional project structure, and yet projects are the means by which organisations conduct their business. The podstars project seems to be at about the right level for meeting both of these needs - it was identified as an internal project with people attached to it, there were some loose objectives associated with it, but it remained fairly lightweight and exploratory. A university may well have a higher level goal of finding efficient means of disseminating knowledge, which this would feed into, but it has to emerge out of work the academics feel is of value, rather than top-down directives. I can't guarantee these academics will continue using new tools, and scaling the project up will be an issue, but it does seem that if you repeated this often enough you would start to create an environment wherein the sort of frictionless outputs I have talked about elsewhere become a reality.
• Being creative is fun - who knew?

If anyone is running, or runs a similar project in their place, I'd be interested to hear about it.

The network ate my newspaper

(So what do you think of David Cameron then Gordon?)

So the UK televised Leaders Debates have now finished. I have to say, it's been a blast. Not because they were good television (after the first one and the surprise Clegg factor they quickly reverted to saying the same things), but because of the back-channel on twitter. In 2008 I suggested that the Eurovision song contest was the perfect TV twitter event because

"It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire to share. And you know that it is a communal event, so others will be watching too."

The same might be said of the leaders debates. Having the back channel has been endlessly amusing and inventive with twitpics, hashtags, videos and jokes being shared in real time. It has also been very informative as people have challenged the views represented and sought out facts and shared these.

Over at the BBC Rory Cellan-Jones suggests that

"So far, it's been a much better election for the mainstream media - or the "MSM" as they're described by an often contemptuous blogosphere - than you might have expected. The bloggers hoped they would boss this campaign, breaking stories, setting the mood, and leaving the flat-footed old media types trailing in its wake."

The alternative is also true - ask yourself this, could you really function as a political journalist (or academic) and not have followed this election on twitter? I'm with John Naughton who argues that:

"One of the more comical aspects of the current UK election is the way ‘old’ media (newspapers and broadcast TV) gloated about how they had ‘transformed’ the election from the venerable two-party slugfest into a supposedly more open contest. There’s a note of triumphalism here: “see”, the dinosaurs are braying, “for all this talk of an ‘online election’, the impact of the Net, social networking, twitter etc. it’s really going to be decided by older, tried-and-trusted media”. There may be a lot of cyberchatter on Twitter and Facebook, the political editors jeer, but it’s not showing up on the doorstep."

I think the effects of social networking are quite subtle. I'm not naive, I know that the majority of UK voters aren't on twitter, but this is still fairly new. How will that look at the next election? The thing about social networks is that they are difficult to manipulate. Like John Gilmore's quote about the internet, something similar can be said:

"Social networks dissipate direct pressure and push back"

This means it is much more difficult to manipulate people in a network the way the broadcast media can be manipulated. It requires more energy and when you apply that pressure the network pushes back (usually with sarcastic humour and parody, which is the politicians worst enemy).

So while old media may be congratulating themselves, they have missed the point. This is the election that marked the beginning of the end of their power, they just haven't noticed it. I am reminded of a quote from the (not particularly good) film Deep Impact, in which the President, as played by Morgan Freeman, says to the plucky reporter:

"it might seem that we have each other over the same barrel, but it just seems that way."

Academic output as collateral damage

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Learning on Screen conference, which was hosted at the OU, with the title of 'Academic output as collateral damage.' The talk arose from two recent events: the first was the public engagement day at the OU, which I felt was a bit old media and didn't really address the idea of academics producing digital outputs as part of their everyday practice. Jonathan Sanderson commented on 'public engagement as collateral damage', which was too good a phrase not to pinch. The second was the slidecast I produced for George Siemens and Dave Cormier's course, which both explored these issues a bit more and was also an example of the type of output I had in mind.

The (poor audio quality) slidecast is below:

Academic output as collateral damage

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

My main points were that you can view higher education as a long tail content production system. And if you are producing this stuff as a by-product of what you do anyway then a host of new possibilities open up. You can embrace unpredictability - which if you are spending £1000s on a TV series you don't want, but online unpredictability is a good thing, it's where all the innovation comes from. But most importantly I think it means we can do things we couldn't do before - George and Dave's open course is an example of this and we've only just begun to explore the possibilities that this new relationship with content affords.

Social media in society roundup

I'd like to do this regularly, but probably won't, a review of stories and how social media has related to them. I think it would be interesting to chart the impact social media is having on actual society (not just the techie or ed techie one). Here are a few stories over the past month that caught my attention:

Rentokil news release - in March several newspapers ran a story about there being '2,000 bugs in every train carriage'. It was based on "Research by pest controllers Rentokil". Science journalist Ben Goldacre smelt (ahem) a rat and followed it up. Ben chased them up through twitter, email and phone but couldn't get access to the email which had been sent to journalists by Rentokil's PR company. But eventually the truth emerged:

"After a bit of prodding, their PR company Brands2Life explained how these bugs were counted. No buses were studied, and no trains were studied either. ... contrary to what was said earlier, wherever it came from, these numbers did not come from measurements and counts, they are actually based on a “theoretical model”.

...Rentokil’s model for the number of bugs on trains and buses made some interesting assumptions, and you will have your own view on whether they make for a reasonable approximation to the real world.

They assumed, for example, that the railway carriage or bus was left alone, by itself, in isolation. They assumed this isolated carriage was helpfully furnished with a plentiful food supply. They assumed that the ratio of male and female bugs was perfectly optimal for breeding.

They assumed – surprisingly for anyone involved in modelling populations, surprisingly for anyone, really – that the population of bugs would be left entirely unchecked, with no external factors to control the mortality rate. They assumed that the siding or garage was controlled at a constant temperature all day and night, with no extremes, they assumed there were no trampling commuters, no cruel vaccum cleaners, no anything. In fact they assumed there was no cleaning, ever, and no passengers, ever. This was their model of insect populations on commuter vehicles.

“On the above basis” Rentokil’s PR explained to me: “it is possible that the stated numbers of cockroaches and bed bugs/fleas could live on a train carriage or bus.”"

Anyone who has read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science will be familiar (if depressed) with this kind of PR story being taken up wholesale and unquestioningly by the press. What is interesting here is that listening to Ben on Radio 4 later that week he commented how the use of blogs and twitter allowed him the space to really track these stories down. In a newspaper column it would seem pedantic and picky, and there would be a word limit, but in the social media space he received information and encouragement from his twitter network. This means that, although they'll still try it, PR companies now have a space where they will be held to account, whereas previously no-one would get to hear about their exaggerations, assumptions or lies because of a complicit agreement in the mainstream press. The make it up and don't give a damn party is over.

Nestle - this was the subject of one of those twitter storms that brew up quickly (and I have to say, even when I agree with them, they have the whiff of a pitchfork wielding mob about them). Nestle have a Facebook page, which had been ticking along nicely for a couple of years, with people discussing how they eat their Kit-Kats. Then Greenpeace encouraged people to adapt Nestle logos, to support their anti-Nestle campaign, on the use of palm oil. Cnet covers the story here. People started doing this on the Facebook page and the Nestle representative came in heavy handed demanding they remove the copyright infringing logos, etc. Then it got going on twitter and became a trending topic, generating lots of bad publicity for Nestle.

What this demonstrates is that people will use an organisation's Facebook page as a means of demonstration and protest. The best defence against this is to be a 'nice' company, but even then some people may have differences of opinion. The difficulty then is knowing how to handle them. It's not clear who the Nestle representative was, but it could have been some untrained employee who was just given the page as part of their duty and responded brusquely. Such a response is worse than no response and for organisations the Nestle furore should be one of those case studies on handling new media.

Leader's debate - on 15th April in the UK we had our first televised leaders debate as part of the general election. It is widely acknowledged that the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg came out best in this. From a personal perspective it was the perfect twitter event TV. It wasn't particularly interesting, but the backchannel around twitter brought it to life. While the broadcast analysts were still pondering the big messages #Iagreewithnick was a trending topic, showing that the network had determined the main outcome (which the conventional broadcasters agreed upon over the ensuing few days). A tweet which got retweeted many times summed it up pithily: "What we learnt tonight: Clegg is a damn fine speaker, Cameron met a black man once and Brown agrees with Nick". In line with the first story here, it was also in online media that we saw many of the claims and anecdotes investigated over the coming few days (if you're interested, my colleague Simon Buckingham-Shum did an excellent analysis of the debate using Compendium, which was better than most of the expert analysis we saw).

What was interesting here was the way that humour was used to puncture the claims and careful gestures of the leaders in a way that serious analysis failed to do. For instance, David Cameron came equipped with a range of anecdotes aimed at demonstrating him to be a man of the people. Fridge-magnet then created a Cameron anecdote generator which got passed around on twitter.

Seeing the threat now posed by Nick Clegg, many of the right-wing newspapers turned their focus on him. The most hysterical was a piece from the Daily Mail which claimed Clegg was some form of Nazi supporter. Within a couple of hours the hashtag #nickcleggsfault was trending on twitter as people punctured the pomposity of such articles by blaming any event, from IE6, to Justin Bieber.

So while this won't be the social media election in the way the Obama one was, because the parties themselves aren't using it as effectively, it will be an election in which social media begins to challenge the dominance of traditional media as the means through which we experience it.

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.  

On the demise of the scheduler

In one of my favourite novels, Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up!, a TV producer gives this advice:

"Scheduling is everything. A programme stands or falls by its scheduling. Understand that, and you'll already have a march on all the other bright young candidates you'll be competing with."

This is 1969 - no producer would give such advice today. The VCR dented it a bit, but you still had to remember to record programmes. The digital, or personal video recorder, Sky+ and Tivo, were a major blow to the status of the scheduler: now recording was really easy and you could series link whole programmes. But what really did for the scheduler was the internet of course. In the UK we have the BBC's iPlayer, 4 on demand, ITV player, and so on.

All of this is relatively old news, and already we may be complacent about what a monumental shift this represents. I was struck by the force of this liberation from scheduling once again this week. I listen to the radio when I'm working, usually BBC 6music or Radio 4. But often there is a lull in the scheduling, particularly the daytime shows on 6music which have been going a bit Radio 1 of late. But look at the shows available on Radio 4 listen again. No, seriously, go and look at them. It is no exaggeration to say I get a tingle of excitement when I look through this list - where to start? And I can stop them, take a phone call, save up all of the book of the week and listen in one go, mix them in with the hilarious Adam and Joe show from 6music, and so on. Radio as a medium, it seems has flourised under the digital liberation (although, commercial radio would argue differently)

I discover shows I didn't know existed, or would not normally catch. The week starts and I genuinely look forward to catching up on four or five weekend shows. It makes you realise how much good quality content you've missed because of the tyranny of scheduling. I'm not a prime time kinda guy I realise, so the programmes that are on when I am actually watching TV or listening to the radio are exactly the programmes I don't want.

Scheduling, or rather being a consumer of scheduling, is a hard habit to break. I still ask the question 'what's on tonight?', like it's someone else's choice. For my daughter's generation this will be a ridiculous question to ask, it will more likely be 'what are we putting on tonight?'. This may be one of those generational shifts: the schedule slaves and the schedulaly liberated. I'm still coming to terms with it: We are the schedulers now.

Oh, and one thing I want is to be able to create my own page for listen again shows: so I go to the BBC and just 'add to my page' any programme I like listening/watching - I create my own BBC channel - I'm not just the scheduler now, I'm the Director General. (Anything like this on the cards, James?)

YouTube offline - who cares?

(via AJCann) So YouTube are going to allow people to download videos. Some, eg Stanford, will be free, and others you can pay for. Viewing online, ie streaming is still free.

Isn't this a bit pointless really? I guess their model is iTunes, but I don't think people want to take their YouTube videos with them in the same way they do their music. And as I opined in a previous post, ownership ain't what it used to be - how often do I really need to access a YouTube clip but not have access? Not enough to make me want to buy anything surely? And it's not as if the trend is towards lower connectivity is it? There's nothing wrong with it, just seems a bit late in the day really.

All of which means this is a post to say 'nothing to see here'.

Does 'David after the Dentist' tell us anything?

Many of you will have seen the YouTube clip of a seven year old boy, rather spaced out on his way back from the dentist:

It's amusing, and bound to get a lot of hits as it is the sort of thing that 'goes viral' easily. But what's really interesting is the way it has set off a host of remixes. We have:

• Chad Vader (Darth's brother) after the dentist
• A funky electro remix
• A mashup of Christian Bale's swearathon and David
• A parody with Josh after the Boozer
• Translation

Following on from the previous posts, this is just like a virus - it spreads and, more importantly, it mutates. It is this mutatability that is key - simply forwarding or embedding it is one level of interest, but when people take it and adapt it in unpredictable ways, then it becomes interesting at an educational level. I don't believe it's possible to analyse this and isolate the elements that make it prone to this with the hope of recreating it, but here are some contributing factors:

• Humour
• Quotable ("Is this real life?")
• Instant recognition (anyone who has seen it will instantly recognise a parody of someone sitting in the back of a car, which gives you an easy frame of reference)
• Popularity (it has to go through the more simple, pass it on phase first, as remixers are then 'cashing in' on its popularity)

I'm not sure there is much we can learn for education - maybe the lesson is 'don't fight it', ie if you want media students to learn about remixing then give them whatever is popular.

Oh, okay, it's just funny.

All educators are broadcasters

I gave a short talk at the OpenU a couple of weeks back about the changing nature of broadcast and what it means for educators. Although it was aimed at the OpenU audience, I think a lot of it is more widely applicable, so I've finally made a slidecast of it. The original had a few audio and video clips, which I haven't included in the slidecast. It does however, feature the now famous 'Caravan equation' (oh, okay famous in my mind only).

What does changes in broadcast mean for educators?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: higher education)

OU YouTube Channel is go

Continuing the 'every educator is a broadcaster' theme of recent months, I'm pleased to point you at the OU YouTube channel. It has two main parts (with a third 'Research' coming on line soon): OU Life which has videos from students and staff; and OU Learn which has clips from OU courses.

It'll be interesting to see how it develops. There are only a handful of videos up at the moment. Unlike a conventional university we can't just point a camera at a lecture and get a (quite boring) video. While we have a large archive, the (swear, curse, shout) rights clearance on this stuff is more difficult than it would be in a sane world, so there is something of a bottleneck.

I'm really excited about it though. What I hope is that its very presence is enough to make educators start to think of 'icasting' and producing a range of videos, and even better, getting their students to do the same.

The video above was produced on request from Laura.