The Ed Techie

Someone Once Told Me (format matters)

Via Sam Easterby-Smith I came across a site called Someone Once Told Me. The idea is simple: the photographer, Mario Cacciottolo, either takes, or gets people to send in, a black and white photograph with the person holding a sign on which is written something someone once told them. It's simple, yet this format throws up a lot of interesting photographs and comments.

I told my daughter about it, and asked her what she would put on a sign. Her instant response was 'It's against the law to sing Christmas songs when it isn't Christmas.' Turns out a friend at school had imparted this piece of knowledge to her, and she had vehemently disagreed with it. I was hoping she would recall one of the many pieces of advice I had given her, but no, this was it. She then wanted to take the photo of course, and today it appeared on the SOTM site.

There are a number of things this brought home to me. The first was participating in sites such as these will become fairly normal for her generation. It is not like appearing on TV. Secondly, this is a good example of a hybrid of expertise and crowd-sourcing. Mario sets up and takes a lot of the photos, but he also gathers them from others (I took our one). This works well both ways.

But most significantly it reveals how a good format helps unleash creativity. There are some very good photos on the site. If they had been given the freedom to take any photo then most wouldn't be as good. The essential paradox is that by limiting scope you encourage creativity. There are lots of such examples around: Carl Morris, a Cardiff acquaintance, runs Sleeveface, where people take photos using album covers to represent faces, and via Gardner Campbell I came across a Flickr group that tells a story in 5 pictures.

I think coming up with such formats, that encourage participation and provide a sufficiently broad, yet narrow, format will be a skill to develop in many sectors.

Shiny show 2

Following on from the hugely irrelevant Shiny Show 1, I bring the next instalment, where I look at any new technologies that have crossed my path and evaluate them from an educational perspective. The usual proviso that some of these may not be that new, it's just when I get to them.

Odadeo - a social network site for dads. It is built around the concept of 'pledges', eg 'I pledge to be more patient', or 'I pledge to take my daughter to see High School bloody Musical 3'. You can then 'pip' your pledges when you do something towards them. You can share pledges and there is a 'Dadsdaq' which shows your progress. I like the way it gets you to define yourself according to various labels (you can invent your own tags), and then find others in those groupings. My concern was that it would be populated by either a) angry Fathers for Justice types or b) American dads who kept crying every ten minutes and hugging each other. But it's not, and is quite a fun place. If you're a dad, check it out.
What's more interesting for me though is if you replaced pledge with 'learning pledge' you've suddenly got the makings of a good learning social network site.
Shiny score - 4/5 Educational score - 2/5

PostRank - I covered this in detail in my previous post, but want to include it for a shiny award too. They get a shiny for their widget alone, see the left hand column on my blog. I think this way of measuring engagement with content is something we need to explore as educators (to help students) and under the digital scholarship banner, as a means of demonstrating the type of response and value there is to your online output.
Shiny score - 3/5 Educational score - 4/5

Shelfari - a social network for book readers. It takes the bookshelf idea from Facebook a little further, so you add books from an extensive database to your 'bookshelf' (I've added a couple to mine as illustration). This can be shared with others, and you can join groups, meet authors, etc. It's well done, and books are a subject people are passionate enough about to make a network viable. Books are sufficiently rich social objects to foster community.
From an educational perspective, like with Odadeo, you could see this being adapted to work around subject areas, or rather the user's bookshelf being imported into a learning environment so that they can join groups around other text books. Because you can tag books, it also adds to resource discovery for learners.
Shiny score - 4/5 Educational score - 4/5

Debategraph - takes the concept mapping idea and wikifies it. It looks nice, and being able to share maps and argument structures clearly has educational potential, but I found it difficult to use. Like a lot of concept mapping tools, it has a range of terminology (for example all the different nodes and types of links), that produce a high threshold to entry. They need to simplify I think, at least on the first play, so you can quickly bash together a mind map, without needing to take a course in mind map theory first. This is in competition rather with the Open University's own Cohere. There is definitely something in this shared maps for education, you can imagine them being legitimate forms of output, or group process, but the software isn't quite there yet.
Shiny score - 3/5 Educational score - 4/5

That's it for now folks, and remember - keep it shiny.

Childcare, summer holidays and my neglected blog

This summer has been tough on the old blog, and it makes me realise I'm a fairweather kind of blogger. We've had a couple of holidays, and I think divorce would loom if I were to say, 'do you mind if I blog while we sip our G and Ts?'. And when not working we've been juggling childcare. My day usually goes something like: the morning I work, while daughter watches TV/plays with toys/gets frustrated with playstation; in the afternoon we go out and do something child oriented; in the evening my wife takes over and I do some more work.

This means I can just about keep up with work, and seeing the contortions other parents get themselves in to over the summer holidays, it makes me appreciate the flexibility of my job and employer. But it doesn't leave much room for anything else, and so this blog has suffered. This has been partly because I haven't had the time to write anything, but also because I haven't had the time to stay connected. I haven't looked in my Google reader for over a week now, and feel slightly nervous about doing so, like when you know you've spent too much money and don't want to look at your bank balance.

I thought I would keep the blog going better over the summer, but it has shown me you need to maintain momentum, and once you lose that the inertia required becomes considerable. I guess this demonstrates what kind of blogger I am (despite my 81% addicted to blogging score recently). It also made me wonder whether it's worth blogging over the summer, since many other people are in the same position (my aplogies, this is a northern hemisphere bias here, to Southern hemisphere bloggers it's not a downtime at all). You could write the killer blog post and it'd be lost amongst all the 'Mark all as read' clicking everyone does when they return to their bulging RSS feeds.

One last thing - despite not actually blogging for a while, I have been thinking about it. In Majorca, at a water park (which was like hell, but wet) I was mentally composing a posting while queuing for a slide. When I was at Gullivers World in Milton Keynes, I had a good idea for a posting on Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. In the car driving to Cornwall, I put together some thoughts on digital culture, web 2.0 and the nature of expertise. Alas, never to be posted. Is there such a thing as blog angst I wonder?

Girls hooked on DS

Tech Digest (via Ewan McIntosh) carries a report that 7 year old girls are 'addicted to' (ie prefer) Nintendo DSs over traditional toys such as Barbie. My (5 year old) daughter has one and this certainly rings true for her. Games such as Pet Hotel, Ponyz, Dogz and Absolutely Anything to do With Animalz (okay I made that last one up), are great fun, and as I've blogged before, they keep her entertained at restaurants.

But I've noticed something else recently, and that is since having a DS, she plays with her physical toys much more. She has never been that keen on playing with toys, but now spends hours engrossed in imaginative games. It's TV that has taken the hit in terms of attention. She doesn't bother with this much at all now (Spongebob Squarepants aside that is). Now this is a sample of one, and going on the basis of correlation, which every first year scientist knows doesn't imply causality (although sadly, no politician knows this), so is not likely to win me a research award. But here's a mini-theory - the interaction with the DS promotes the notion of interactivity as a whole. She then maps this onto her toys and finds that they offer a different, but equally engaging form of interaction. There is then a positive feedback loop between the Nintendo, where she gets to care for ponies and receive feedback, and her toys, where she plays with ponies in an imaginary world. The TV then looks a poor third amongst these. 

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.

My own leisure snobbery

Over the weekend I was forced to confront my own snobbery about what is a good use of leisure time. As I mentioned, we have a Nintendo Wii, and given the adverse weather at the weekend (overseas readers - it snowed in the UK, causing national hysteria), we stayed in quite a bit. My daughter played with the Wii for a while, and then I asked her to stop and switch to board games (which she did happily enough). It made me think about why I have a mental equation which goes something like 'computer games = mildly bad, board games = good'. Why did I feel that the computer games needed to be rationed in some way? I accept the claim about sedentary lifestyles and obesity (although anyone who thinks a Wii is sedentary has never played one, I am currently suffering from 'wii shoulder' brought on by some over-energetic stretching during a tennis match), but given that my daughter does ballet, horse-riding, gymnastics, swimming as well as playing a lot with her peers, she is far from sedentary. And board games are hardly active, yet they don't come in for the criticism computer games receive. No, it's more about other pursuits being deemed more worthy.

As many have pointed out, including Steven Johnson (who has also blogged about the Wii) in 'Everything Bad is Good for you', there are a lot of intellectual and social benefits to computer games. I'm probably the last generation to have this snobbery (I wonder what my daughter will be snobbish about? She'll probably tell her children to stop confusing the android and go and play some virtual reality games). I remember being admonished by my parents for reading too much as a child, so maybe it's just the old parental adage that whatever you're doing you should be doing something else.

LAMS conference

I had submitted a paper to the first LAMS conference in Sydney. However, it clashed with the date of my daughter's school concert, so in an attempt to win a good dad prize I prioritised the concert. They still wanted the paper however, so I came in via Skype with James Dalziel working the powerpoint that end. At 12.15am then last night I was giving a talk while the wind howled outside in Cardiff to an audience immersed in the heat of a Sydney summer. It went quite well (I think) - I should do all my talks like this, sitting in my back room with a cup of tea and a box of biscuits.

The podcast of my talk should be available soon.

My daughter wanted a puppy..

adopt your own virtual pet!