The Ed Techie

Why headlines don't matter

A few people have blogged about this report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. They compared what constituted the headlines for online stories, and traditional media. They put it like this:

If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people?

Which they did by looking at the top stories on sites such as Digg compared with those from traditional providers. The takeaway (amongst some interesting stuff) is

"In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites--Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us--were more focused on stories like the release of Apple’s new iphone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth, according to the study."

The implication is that far from being the place where the informed debate is taking place, the net is more trivial compared with proper media. This is too good for internet detractors to pass up, and Nick Carr duly obliges:

"The techno-utopians would have use believe that citizen journalism will provide an antidote to the mainstream media's long-run shift away from hard news and toward soft news, that it will counter the trend toward news-as-entertainment and entertainment-as-news. But the indication so far is that the precise opposite is true. When you replace professional editors with a crowd or a social network, you actually end up accelerating the dumbing-down of news. News becomes a stream of junk-food-like morsels. "

I agree with George Siemens who says that this is not a valid comparison, as Digg tends to be about technology:

"The real point isn't the content itself. Rather, it's that any community can filter information that it finds to be of greatest importance. What is valuable is process, not the specific content. Many of the news sites - like digg.com - are focused on the tech community. Why not ask what the gossip magazines were discussing while mainstream media was doing "serious work". I'm guessing the journalistic emphasis of these magazines were heavily focused on Britney, Paris, and Lindsay. This is just silly."

But I'd go further as well - Nick Carr is simply not getting it here, or rather not getting several things. The first is that being online isn't about the most popular stories, but about your stories. So what I read will rarely match the top stories, I will have devised my own news agenda. Whereas in traditional media I don't have that choice.

Secondly, the report and Carr make the error of thinking what people share is the same as what they read. This isn't so. The stuff that is shared is often viral, short, and entertaining. Take the Miss Teen South Carolina vid that did the rounds recently. Not big news but the sort of thing people from all different backgrounds share (funny, but I agree with John Connell there was a bit of intellectual cruelty about some of it). This doesn't mean that people are not also discussing other topics in detail, they just may not share these with as many people, since they don't have the broad appeal. For instance, anyone who thinks the blogosphere hasn't got much to say on Iraq, simply isn't paying attention.

Thirdly, we're in long tail territory here. The headline for this report should be 'headlines don't matter.' I spend a lot of time reading online stuff, and very little of it is the junk food morsels Carr describes. Why? Because there is so much stuff to choose from. News items that might not be popular to the general audience are significant to me. Headlines or 'front pages' only matter when you are talking about mass broadcast. We're not, that's the point.

Lastly, less the news people should be patting themselves on the back excessively, it would be good to compare the depth of analysis available in the two mediums. The US media in particular has not covered itself in journalistic glory in the debate around the Iraq war for instance. And had the focus of this research been on UK news they would have found the media obsession with the McCann case dominating the headlines, which has been mainly based on rumour and gossip. And had the report taken in to account tabloid newspapers then it would less worthy again.   

My first slidecast

As part of the broadcast strategy review at the OU, I wanted to show the different types of outputs that academics can produce which might be considered broadcast in some sense. One of these is slidecasting (the combination of powerpoint and audio). I upload my powerpoint files to Slideshare regularly, so thought I'd try adding the audio to one too.

It's a bit fiddly - you have to upload the audio to a different site, as Slideshare don't host it (yet). Synching the audio with slides took a bit of getting used to (I even had to look at the help splashcast), but once I had the hang of it, was pretty smooth and easy to use.

I chose the blogging workshop I did a while ago with Tony Hirst. Be warned, as I've said before, I have an ideal voice for mime. Listening to yourself is tough (I ran the Bristol Half Marathon on Sunday, and if you think listening to yourself is deflating, try seeing photos of yourself running), I um, err and smack my lips like Cliff Richard quite a bit, but it's usable. So, here it is, enjoy!

NYT enters education market, and the changing nature of newspapers

The New York Times has announced an inititiative that will provide content and social networking to students and educators. They claim it is

"a new online initiative that pairs Times content with faculty course material for both credit-bearing and continuing education courses. Educators will now have the opportunity to select Times articles, archival content, graphics and multimedia content, including videos and Webcasts, gathered around specific subjects, and make them available to students online, along with other course materials"

Perhaps more interestingly they edge towards a 'Facebook for learning' when they propose

"In addition to enhanced course offerings for college students and lifelong learners, the Knowledge Network will serve as a global networking and professional and academic development resource for faculty, students and alumnae. Users will be able to share work with colleagues, create their own academic or professional ePortfolios (digital repositories of a person's work), invite peer review and establish professional contact with people around the globe based on common academic pursuits and research."

At the moment it is all based around their own system (they are partnering with Epsilen) so it feels like another publisher saying 'come to our system', so I'm not sure how open it is. For instance can you pull RSS feeds into your system, can you add applications to it, etc.

This is not particularly new - a number of publishers have done similar things. But it does further demonstrate the convergence of industries, and the increased erosion of the educational monopoly enjoyed by universities. At the moment they are selling it as a service that educators can use, but if we look at that second quote, it doesn't take a massive leap of imagination to see other providers offering accreditation and freelance tuition in such a marketplace.

The other reason people will find for dismissing it is the traditional divide between 'journalistic' and 'academic' content. While there is some truth in this, it is a division that is becoming less binary, and increasingly fuzzy. This is partly because being online removes many of the constraints that forced newspapers to produce journalistic material in the first place. These include:

• Space - in the physical format space is at a premium, thus any extended interview, analysis or commentary is usually cut to fit the page and allow for a last minute advert. This is one of the common complaints of both journalists and their interviewees. Online there is no such restriction, so you can have a brief, 'traditional' piece, but also a much longer version.
• Audience - a newspaper has to aim at a general audience, and thus is often accused of dumbing down. Again this need not be the case online, because you can reach a global audience, not a national or regional one. Therefore what would be a small interest piece in your printed version can have a sufficiently long tail with a global audience. And, if space doesn't cost, then why not publish it?
• Format - the newspaper is restricted to print and the odd photograph, although as noted, the exact size and quantity of both elements will be determined by its physical limitations. Online of course there is the freedom to have different media types: audio, video, animation. But perhaps more significantly there is the freedom to play around with the format of these media types - you can have blogs which have a different feel from an official article, or podcasts, or online debates, etc. This allows the format to suit the subject, not the subject to be manipulated to fit the confines of the format.
• The journalistic filter - when a newspaper was purely a physical object then the process of producing an article with all of the above limitations acted as a filter. It required specialist knowledge, which was embodied in the journalist. This person didn't have specialist knowledge of the subject area they were writing about (although they are often broad subject area specialists, e.g technology writers), but they did know about the process of creating newspaper copy. When the limitations are removed, so is the need for much of this expertise. We are all journalists now. This means that a lot of material doesn't need to go through the filter of the journalist, a process which is subject to misinterpretation, bias, editing, and mistakes, but instead can come from the expert themselves. Admittedly not all experts are good writers, but the process of disintermediation has commenced.

And in education the same process is happening in reverse. There the academic article was the unit of thought currency, but this was also largely determined by physical limitations. Online we are finding that the blog posting, and perhaps more significantly the distributed debate, is often more informative.

The upshot of all this is that those of us in education shouldn't be sniffy about journalistic content - it'll be knocking on your lecture hall door any time now.

(Thanks to Tony for the link)

BT Vision - the sound of failure

A while back, as part of the Broadcast strategy review, I was in a meeting with BTVision. Their new broadcast package sounded interesting, you get Freeview through the aerial and then they use broadband to deliver on demand services, and some subscription. I liked the hybrid nature of it, so I decided to test it out. What followed was a catalogue, no, an encyclopedia, of errors.

You have to subscribe to BT Broadband, so I did this on the phone and signed up for the BTVision package I wanted. The chap set an installation date for me (morning of 8th August). The broadband hub arrived and I installed that reasonably easily (although it did make IE7 go loopy, but Firefox worked okay).

Yesterday I sat in waiting for the engineer. Here is my account of the day:

• 12pm - I decide to ring as I haven't heard anything. I wait 14 minutes in a queue before I am told 'they'll be there by 1.'
• 12.40 - I ring again, I wait around 15 mins again. I speak to someone who says she will check with the engineers. When she comes back she says they won't tell her where they are. Not a good communication policy I thought, but shrugged it off. Once again I'm assured they'll be there by 1.
• 1.25 - I ring again. After a 20 minute wait the woman tells me 'you're not down to have an installation today.' I am transferred to someone who tells me that when I was initially sold BTVision their systems were down, so they couldn't check whether I had sufficient broadband speed to receive BTVision. They have since done the checks and I can't. Needless to say they didn't mention any of this at the time. They have sent me a letter explaining this, which hasn't arrived yet (a letter mind - you're a telecoms company, trying ringing me!) Feeling very irate now I ask to speak to a manager. I am put on hold for 15 minutes, then speak to someone who says I shouldn't have been given a date for installation but instead should have been told I would get an email. I wasn't, so have spent the day waiting indoors. She offers 3 months free telephone line rental as apology. I explain that I don't want BT broadband as I wanted a complete package and only took it because it was part of BTVision. She says she has to transfer me to the broadband department. I am put on hold.
• 2.30 - I am still holding, but have another meeting to go to, so hang up.
• 6.10pm - I ring the Broadband dept. After 15 minutes I speak to someone and explain I need to cancel as I was missold BTVision and need a Mac code. She says she will investigate and puts me on hold.
• 6.55 - after 25 minutes of further holding, I am cut off.
• 7.05 - ring again. After 14 minutes I get through and explain the situation again. The chap informs me that I am on a contract so can't just withdraw. I am now sobbing in frustration. I explain that the only reason I have BT Broadband is because I was missold BTVision. He says he will raise an issue, which means they will investigate and let me know within 4 working days.
• 7.45 - exhausted, I collapse, twitching everytime a BT Broadband advert comes on the TV.

Even if we accept the more generous interpretation that the initial misselling was just a mistake, (although if they try and keep the contract my darker suspicions will be aroused) what really bothers me about the above is the manner in which telephone holding is used as a weapon against disatisfied customers. I suspect I wouldn't have had to wait as long to speak to sales if I was a new customer.

Just look at the amount of time I spend just waiting. An endless sequence of hold messages and muzak - these are the sounds a dying organisation makes.

The content law

Through the various projects I've been involved in recently (openlearn, broadcast strategy review, Flosscom), I've come to the realisation that something very significant has happened to the nature of content. It can be summarised thus:

"Digital content wants to be free, and will seek the path to maximum access."

Let's call it the content law. It can be seen as a variation on Dan Gillmore's 'the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it'. Evans and Wurster have argued that the digital marketplace has seen the unbundling of the economics of information and physical product. This is most readily seen in retail, where you have to see the physical object in a shop to know about it, but online the product information is separated out. David Weinberger explores the implications of this unbundling further, in that it allows  infinite recategorisation because the information, unlike the physical product, can be in multiple places at once.

When the product is digital (image, movie, text, audio) then both the product and it's information (and in the Weinberger sense the product is the information since everything is metadata), can be in multiple places. One of the consequences of this is that for any given digital market the ultimate outcome will be that eventually, and despite all the efforts to restrict it, digital content will be freely available.

Let's consider some examples. Firstly, photography: in an analogue world the physical photograph (or the negative) was the information and the product. If you wanted to buy a photo you would have to buy a physical copy. The numbers of these could be controlled, and thus so could the price. With digital photography the initial online offerings still attempted to sell costly images in the $100s. For the individual services like Ofoto allowed you to share photos, but only at a thumbnail, and only with limited people. They didn't want users to download the digital file, only to order prints from them. Then along comes Flickr and now we have largely free content, available to everyone.

In broadcast the changes haven't quite gone this far yet, but they will. As content moves online and companies like Sky and BT move in to each other's territory (Sky offering broadband, BT offering TV services), then the expensive subscription model of Sky begins to break down. There is too much free content out there to make it worthwhile. Large events (mainly sports) are sustaining the subscription model for a while, but eventually it will become unviable. Sky know this which is why they are branching out in to other services which people will pay for, such as broadband.

Lastly, music has been the one industry that has really struggled with this desire for content to be liberated. For years the record company ignored the internet (a case of commercial negligence), until Napster forced them to take notice. Suddenly content was free and everywhere. They fought back with legal action and restrictive DRM. The important thing for record company execs to realise is that the success of iTunes represents a step along the path to the liberation of content, not an end point. Increasingly artists are recording their own material, releasing it  online and establishing a live following. They are effectively disintermediating the record companies. Having established an audience the artist may then sign a deal with a company for some of the marketing, but this is only because we have the intermediate stage of CDs still.

There are a number of steps in all these scenarios. The process goes something like this:

1. The industry ignores the implications of digitisation and the internet
2. The industry sees the internet as a means to find a global market for doing roughly the same business model.
3. An initial outsider breaks down barriers, but the industry fights back with heavy handedness that demonstrate it wants to hold on to the original model and doesn't get it.
4. A halfway business model is found. The industry breathes a sigh of relief and execs open the champagne, because they think they have found a way to maintain their established business practice and enhance the possibilities of the net. They're wrong.
5. Through bottom up activity and newcomers to the industry content gradually becomes free and alternative business models emerge.
6. The established players finally realise the model has changed and adapt or die.

The content law may seem simple, but it has enormous implications. Let's try a thought experiment: imagine a matter transporter has been invented. The implications for transport industries, car manufacturers, holidays, property prices, retail etc would be enormous. The physical (including people) becomes digital content as it were, so there is no need to live near your place of work (or even to have a 'place of work').

The internet is a matter transporter for digital content. If you are working in any sector where the content can be digitised (broadcast, music, newspapers, movies, and er, education) then you should repeat the content law to yourself everyday, because it means you have to find alternative revenue streams for when your content achieves its nirvanic state of free and available to everyone. There may be some content which can survive this law, but you are probably going to do your organisation a bigger service if you assume the content law is true for you also and instead of trying to find ways to combat it, you seek ways to build new models around it.

Flickrvision and glanceability

I spent rather too long gazing at Flickrvision today (via Alan Cann). In a kind of web 2.0 orgy, I had some americana music playing through LastFM also which made it an audio/visual experience (of course I should have been twittering about it to really be 2.0, but I'll blog instead). Tony Hirst recently blogged about the concept of glanceability which we picked up from James Cridland. This strikes me as a good example, although I didn't so much glance as lose myself (perhaps we need another term such as procrastinatability or gazeability). I could dip in and out as I worked but it was more than just radio, and different from TV.

I have been having some thoughts about future collaboration with the BBC and one might be to generate glanceability content that is associated with a radio programme, so it can scroll across a digital TV or a web player. This might be OU material, or student generated material from OU students. Either way I think it is possible to have decent synergy between a programme that is of interest to students and content that is of interest to general listeners. I wasn't so keen on Twittervision as an entertainment or diversion, although I can see it may have good educational uses again if it was linked to a programme or event.

A critical mass of tagged, subscribable content

I haven't looked at Pageflakes for a while and went there the other day. I registered as a new user, and it impressed me with the default content it provided. It picked up I was in Cardiff from my IP address and provided me with a decent set of Cardiff related content, including:

• Cardiff news stories
• Cardiff photos
• A google map with Cardiff events marked on it
• Cardiff weather

Several things struck me about this, apart from thinking 'that's cool!' (as an aside can a 40 year old actually use the term 'cool' in any context without embarrassment?). The first was that considering it only had one bit of info to go on, that's not bad personalisation. Imagine what a learning system could do that had course history, user preferences, learning styles (if such things really existed), scores, etc to go on?

Second, this level of purely automatic content selection (I don't suppose there was a little man selecting content for me at the Pageflakes garage) has only really been realisable recently as we have reached a critical mass of content that is tagged (the photos were from Flickr and just used the tag Cardiff) and which is subscribable and available. Having been an advocate of learning objects a few years back (and as a means of writing, I am still a fan), this critical mass was something they never really achieved and so the visions of a personalised course didn't materialise. It also demonstrates, if further demonstration were needed, that making your content available in RSS and accessible (ie not behind authentication) is the key to both getting it seen and to a personalised future.

The last thing was what could an institution like the OU do with something like this, maybe in conjunction with the BBC? Users could receive calendars with appropriate programmes slotted in, maps with relevant  'learning events' highlighted in their locality (which could be user generated e.g. a meeting of the physics club in the Cayo at 8pm), content that relates to both their subject and geographical area (e.g. an example of classic Georgian architecture can be found at...), plus a range of general subject content feeds.

Open as to...

The OU's internal curriculum and technology conference ran over the last couple of days. As with all such events it is both inspiring and a bit deflating. Inspiring because you get to hear of all the good stuff going on and see the enthusiasm of your colleagues. Deflating because things you want to happen still seem a long way off, and some of the same old arguments keep coming up.

One of the thoughts that occurred to me (not for the first time) was that the OU now needs to establish a new definition of openness, and by extension, new identity for itself. The OU's mission statement is:

open to people, places, methods and ideas

Now these are all good, I don't want to do away with any (although I sometimes might question the how much the methods one is true), but I think we could extend this to open as to technology and content. Here's why: increasingly the tools people use as part of their everyday lives are far more sophisticated than universities can create and (more significantly) maintain. We're going to have to accept that people have these tools and don't want a separate (inferior) set for learning. The walled garden approach is becoming less and less viable. Similarly, the amount and quality of content available makes the creation of bespoke content a much less useful way of spending time for an academic. But obviously we need to do something, so what we do is offer some good quality content, we construct good learning activities and we offer support and guidance (as well as all that accreditation stuff).

The other aspect of openness that struck me was that, like all unis, our VLE requires authentication to access. As soon as you do this you are cut off from the connected world. You can't use cool tools like Gabbly (unless you install a university version), and you can't subscribe to feeds. This came home to me in a workshop Tony Hirst ran, and he has a good rant on how the OU is failing to grasp the significance of RSS. Now there are a lot of reasons why a VLE needs to be closed (rights, privacy, etc), but increasingly it looks like a high price to pay.

I gave a talk on the broadcast strategy, which looked at how things have changed and suggests some new models for how broadcast could be used in teaching. Slideshare file below:

Educator as DJ

James Cridland gave a good presentation today at the OU's internal curriculum and technology conference, talking about the Virgin radio site, and more significantly about the changing nature of broadcast. I'm presenting tomorrow on the broadcast strategy and so his talk had a lot of resonance with me. What struck me when listening to James was that radio now has to compete with the likes of LastFM, and indeed Virgin has a similar social networking site (which I must admit I was unaware of). Given that you can find the music you like and listen to a much greater range of stuff through the likes of LastFM, what makes people want to listen to broadcast radio? The answer is, I guess, the DJ. I wonder if there is an analogy between the tension between radio and LastFM and education and open educational resources here. Just as LastFM provides free content, but some people like a DJ to put context around it, so OER provides free educational content but the educator (or academic institution) puts it into context and provides guidance. So, educators are like DJs, but without so many annoying catchphrases.