The Ed Techie

The lack of uptake of new technology by researchers

Yesterday I gave a presentation for George and Stephen's open course PLENK. You can see the recording of the session here. The slidedeck is below:

Research, technology & networks

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

I have been writing a chapter on research and how researchers are (or rather aren't) using new technologies for my digital scholarship book. Several good surveys and reviews have been published recently looking at this, and the overall picture is a rather depressing one (see some references in my Mendeley list). While there are islands of innovation, generally researchers are making little use of new technologies and are very cautious and conservative in their adoption.

I talked about why this might be so and suggested the following reasons:

• The stranglehold of publishing - tenure and reward are still linked to publishing in academic journals, so spending time on other forms of communication is not directly encouraged. This is reinforced through research quality assessment exercises which are closely allied to publishing, such as the REF.
• Wasting new blood - related to the above, in other sectors new recruits are seen as the people who bring in new ideas. Yet in education because tenure is linked so closely to traditional outputs, new researchers are positively discouraged from spending time on other endeavours. So the very people who might engage in transforming practice are discouraged from doing so. This leaves it to tenured academics to engage in innovation, but these have mostly been successful through more traditional means so their history tells them to carry on this way. The pool of potential adopters then is decreased by the research context we have in place. I suggested this was quite a harmful environment to create.
• Antithetical to research ethos - I also put forward the suggestion that in science in particular, research is about predicting outcomes, and much of web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) is about unpredictability - you don't know what will happen with your outputs, or through a network.
• Research is the core practice - despite how much academics might say they value teaching, or public engagement, it is still research that is most highly valued. This means it is the area people are least willing to risk their reputation in and want to control most tightly.

I then suggested some themes that I thought were emerging, but that is for another post.

Of course one might argue it doesn't matter. Researchers will adopt new technologies if they are effective, and there is an underlying assumption in my talk that adoption is a good thing, which isn't necessarily true. This may well be the case, but there are three responses to this which at least bear consideration:

• The impact of the negative context - if research adoption of new technologies (and associated practices eg open publishing) is being impaired by the financial/reward structure we have in place, then we need to address whether that structure is doing research a disservice in the long term
• Powerful tools - I know through personal experience that even when people have been dismissive, or cautious of a particular tool, when it is demonstrated in the right context, or they appreciate its possibilities, then they will find uses for it in their academic work that I had never anticipated. This isn't true for everyone or for all uses, but it is worth chipping away at misconceptions and demonstrating potential.
• The role of the researcher - as higher education seeks to demonstrate its value to society, it strikes me that it is potentially dangerous not to be leading on the use and development of new tools, and particularly on what they mean for knowledge construction and sharing, rather than leaving it to others.

Living in pregnant widow times

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/janrito/118498874/ black widow by Janrito Karamazov>

For the title of his latest novel, Martin Amis borrows from this Alexander Herzen quote

“The death of contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.”

Amis is writing about the sexual revolution, but I think the same can be applied to the digital revolution. This is what causes so much angst in the popular press, and amongst society in general. We can see what is passing, but what is forming is still unclear. Clay Shirky, talking about newspapers puts it thus:

"So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don't know. Nobody knows. We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen."

We can think about some general directions of travel, we can make some guesses, and most of all, we can experiment. My interest is what the changes mean for scholarly practice, how will academics perform research, what will education look like twenty years from now, how can we best be engaged in public debates? We have a very well established set of methods for all of these currently, but it is unlikely that any of them will remain untouched by the impact of digital, social networks. And as with other industries, trying to find ways to preserve them as they are, or with a digital veneer, won't be sufficient when other find innovative ways to achieve the same ends using the new tools. If you accept the argument that we are living in such a period of change, then what academic wouldn't be interested in observing this change in any field, let alone that of their own practice.

As Amis puts it in his novel, "it was a revolution. And we all know what happens in a revolution. You see what goes, you what stays, you see what comes."

What goes, what stays and what comes - each of element of this trio is significant. Often we concentrate on 'what comes', but it's just as interesting to consider what stays. This reveals what is important to us (will journalism stay? Will universities stay?), or at least what is so ingrained culturally or commercially as to be immovable. The QWERTY keyboard has stayed thus far in the digital age, despite being an analogue solution, not through any sense of value, but because it was too entrenched to overthrow. 

What goes is equally revealing, because it demonstrates that practices and values we may have seen as unassailable are suddenly vulnerable because the assumptions they are based upon are no longer valid. The scarcity, rivalrous nature and distribution model of many goods and content is one such example. When they became abundant, non-rivalrous and freely distributed whole industries began to look weak. The 'what goes' element may also reveal to us what was important and not so important after all.

We generally assume that after a peaceful social revolution the resulting practice is an improvement for the majority of people, otherwise it wouldn't occur. Unless the revolution is imposed upon the people, then the general direction will be towards a utilitarian improvement. But this doesn't mean the post-revolutionary world will be better for everyone. There are those whose profession and identity will be strongly allied to the existing practices. There will be practices and values that are lost that we find we did in fact hold dear, but which were too closely attached to the older methods to survive. In short, there will be winner and losers. A revolution may be bloodless, but is rarely painless for all.

Which is why we see scare stories about games damaging kids health, or social networks ruining the nature of friendship, or piracy killing artistic endeavour, or the fabric of society being damaged irrevocably by the addiction to computers. We are learning what role these new tools play in our lives, and there will inevitably be mistakes, misapplication, over-use and correction. For example, many people reported something resembling an addiction to social networks when they first started on them, but these have since settled into a more controlled, regular place in our lives.

We are living in pregnant widow times, and we can see what is going, but we don't yet know what is staying and what is coming. And that's kinda fun isn't it?

The New Bereavements

In a Twitter chat with Josie Fraser yesterday, she said that the URL shortening service u.nu has closed down and joked that she wasn't sure of the correct etiquette for the passing of such a thing:

u.nu url shortening service discontinued after constant spammer abuse http://u.nu/unu-discontinued so long, & thanks fr all the links.less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhoneJosie Fraser
josiefraser

I have been pondering for a while that we face a new set of bereavements. We are probably going to face these more, so for example, how do you react when your favourite service disappears? Imagine, say, Slideshare disappeared tomorrow. How would I feel? Anger that I have lost data, annoyance that old links won't work, upset that the good people there are out of jobs, saddened that such a thing didn't survive?

Another example I've encountered over the past year is when someone suddenly quits Twitter (or stops blogging or whatever). As these are people I am unlikely to ever meet face to face they are effectively lost gone. In real life we might mourn the passing of a friendship, so how do we react online? Should one shrug, or hold a candlelit vigil?

I expect we'll face more of these new forms of small-scale loss. There will be online therapists no doubt to help us cope.

PS - if there isn't one already, then someone should start a band called The New Bereavements.

The ups & downs of embracing unpredictability

In a recent presentation I argued that producing low cost content as a by-product allowed institutions to embrace unpredictability, in a way they can't do when spending large sums of money on content. If you are spending a decent amount of money you need a project, with identified target customers, objectives, key performance indicators, a budget, lines of responsibility, etc. But a lot of the fun stuff online happens unpredictably. The makers of Downfall didn't intend for it to be an internet meme  after all (and then blew their chance when it became one). As John Naughton puts it the net is "a global machine for springing surprises".

In a small way I had an example last week, which will be familiar to many bloggers. I wrote a post about peer review, the essence of which was to say I would no longer review for closed journals. I knocked it out fairly quickly, in half an hour while I was waiting for a meeting to start (blogging is great for filling these gaps) and did some quick calculations. John Naughton blogged it, and from John's link I received the equivalent of the blogging Legion D'Honneur, Cory Doctorow blogged it at BoingBoing. A ripple then starts so a few others blogged it (including Richard Stallman and George Siemens). You can see this peak of traffic here:

This is fun when it happens, but you can't predict it. In my view the previous post to that one, on new local newspaper models, was a better one. But you'd drive yourself insane by attempting to predict which posts get picked up and by who. There is undoubtedly a threshold - once someone like BoingBoing links to a post then there will be an almost guaranteed level of traffic. But there are too many variables to know when something might get linked to. The message for this is twofold - firstly just keep going, and secondly, be very wary of any expert who tells you they know how to generate traffic and control that pesky unpredictably.

If social media had been first...

I'm sure someone else has done this before and better, but let's imagine a parallel universe where social media had come before face to face socialisation. Our writer, Richard Liitleinsight for the Maily Blog takes up the story...

The sad truth about 'f2f'

I've never tried face to face (or f2f as it's known by the sad geeks who participate in it), but I know I don't need to in order to understand that it is a facile, shallow form of interaction compared with the rich dialogue we have built up over centuries in social media.

F2F gatherings often take place in specially designed physical spaces. The spaces cannot be altered, people here think moving a chair around is rearranging. Gone is the rich possibility of creating virtual worlds, of being a flying cow or a twelve foot purple cat in a world with 1/3 earth's gravity. No, here people sit around at tables and inanely flip cardboard 'beer mats' against a backdrop of red flock wallpaper.

But if the environment itself were not depressing enough, then the level of interaction is enough to have any right thinking citizen weeping. F2Fers talk about football, what they had for dinner and that bloke in the office, over and over again. Gone is the rich debate, the informed discussion - here there is no recourse to wikipedia, instead interlocutors call upon a mythical 'bloke in the pub told me' as their sole source of fact.

Even more worrying we seem to be abandoning our cultural history of considered debate. In a F2F setting there is no time for reflection, the imperative is always upon the immediate. the sound-bite, as if the motto were 'say anything rather than be silent'. I don't know about you, but I was always brought up to believe that taking your time to reflect, research and compose your response was the best way to proceed.

Experts warn that f2fing could damage our communication skills (photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/74321115@N00/4219119825/)

Another disturbing factor is the drastic pruning of social relationships. Having developed skills at maintaining a complex set of relationships that are not limited by geography, time or demographics, the F2Fers now find themselves only able to be 'friends' (they have misappropriated the Facebook term) with people they can meet at a set time in a set location. Psychologists believe that this contraction to a restricted set, what is being termed the Dunbar number, will severely limit the capacity for social growth and innovation.

When we think about the great bloggers of the past, such as Montaigne, we can ask where are the great bloggers amongst the F2F set? They are almost entirely consumed with 'chatting' with people in cafes and bars. Would Montaigne have written so many thoughtful blog posts if he had spent all his time sipping lattes? I think the answer is no.

But all this might be dismissed as the ravings of an old misery, which is fine, but the implications could be far more sinister. No less a scientific dignitary than Baroness Brownhouse has recently decried the rise in F2F popularity, stating that 'it is a fact that less online interaction will rewire these kids brains resulting in them being less capable of processing complex information. By tweeting to 2 or 3 people I know that restricting your social field to those you can meet on a real time basis reduces an individual's neurological capacity for reflection, empathy and social understanding. Fact. Fact. Fact.'

Lastly, this F2F phenomena has seen a rise in a new, voodoo form of economics and publishing, where instead of gathering the inputs from everyone and allowing the best to rise to the surface, contributions are 'filtered'. This has led to paper based productions, labelled 'newspapers' being passed around for money. The so called writers (termed 'journalists') of these, don't contribute their ideas or opinions based on beliefs or knowledge, but rather are led by the business motivations of the newspaper owner. In one story I heard, a sinister underground figure known only as 'Murderok' owned several 'newspapers' and made the journalists write what he wanted. And yet the F2Fers proclaim this as a form of freedom because it allows for journalistic privilege! What happened to the wisdom of the crowds?!

So, while new blog darlings rush to embrace the F2F rebellion and abandon their twitter accounts for Starbucks loyalty cards, and reject considered thought in favour of inane blatherings, I'll stick to what has worked fine for the past few hundred years. As Shakespeare posted, 'I blog, therefore I am.'

My final offer is this: nothing

 

Recently I wanted to use a Creative Commons image in a project which was a bit blurry as to whether it constituted commercial use or not, so I contacted the owner and asked them as they had specified non-commercial. They asked for payment (which is of course their right), but I didn't have a budget so I declined and found an alternative image.

Similarly I was looking for an image of a bee a while ago for a school project for my daughter and found a nice one, but they wanted $200. After I had stopped laughing I went and found a free alternative.

And this is the problem for any online commodity - there is always a free alternative available. It may not be as good, but it'll do. I apply the same approach to articles and referencing - if I have to pay to access your article, I'll find an alternative which says more or less the same thing, and which I can access freely.

The question for anyone wishing to charge for an online product then is this "are there free alternatives available". If the answer is yes, then forget charging.

In this respect I was reminded of Michael Corleone in The Godfather 2. Senator Pat Geary is attempting to extract a bribe from him and Micheal responds:

"You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing"

Corleone has violence and intimidation to back up his offer of nothing - we have abundance of alternatives. I'm not arguing whether this is morally correct, maybe we should pay, but the point is about behaviour.

iPhone - the convergulator

You will remember, no doubt, that during the late nineties and the first part of the decade, there was much talk of 'convergence' in industry, ie that various industries such as music, news, film, games would 'converge' around the internet. This was in some respects, a dream of the big corporations who read it as 'merging' or 'take-over'. The industries still remained under the same basic model, they just used the internet as a delivery platform. But (I think Clay Shirky has argued this but can't find the quote now), convergence didn't happen like that - it was more like the internet took over these industries and transformed them. The term convergence implies a symmetry to the deal, instead of the steam-rollering that actually occurred.

Anyway, it was this now slightly outdated concept of convergence that came to mind when I surveyed the different applications I now have on my iPhone. I know loads of people will have made this point before, but I've only recently acquired an iPhone and there's nothing like seeing it happen in your very house. The iPhone is like some secret weapon devised by an evil genius, 'I call it ... The Convergulator!'. All my other independent devices are now converging (read 'being replaced by') onto the iPhone. Here are the separate pieces of kit I have now replaced by the iPhone

• Music player - obvious I know, but I now have no need for a separate portable music player from my phone, and also something we don't always acknowledge, although I have a docking speakers at home, the idea that I would have a distinct music system for home and for travel has gone.
• Camera - I do have a specialist camera also, and the iPhone one isn't brilliant, but it's getting there.
• Video - i don't even have the 3GS but downloaded an app called iVideoCamera that allows me to record video. Again I do have a specialist video camera (a nice Flip), but do I have that on me when I want to record? No. (App costs 59p)
• Alarm clock - I have a cheap pair of speakers next to my bed and with Alarm Clock Pro I can have some nice display options and wake up to a choice of music. (App costs 59p)
• Running GPS device - I have a Garmin Forerunner which tracks your runs, records pace, etc. It cost about £120. For Christmas my wife was going to get herself one, but instead found RunKeeper Pro. It uses the GPS capability in the iPhone and gives accurate map recording, pace and nice data storage. So she uses this quite happily instead of a Garmin. (App costs £5.99)
• Games console - my daughter has a Nintendo DS (it is almost a legal requirement that a girl of 8 has a DS), but because I got an iPhone she inherited my iTouch. This is now her preferred portable games console. Again, it may not be as sophisticated as the specialist tool but it offers enough.
• eBook Reader - I have yet to play with a Kindle, but when I'm travelling I occasionally find myself without a book. I have downloaded several 'Classics' bundles on the iPhone so I can read some Dickens, plus I have the Guardian app (cost £2.59) so I can read all of their content.
• Digital radio - I use the TuneIn.FM iCar radio app which acts as a digital radio perfectly adequately. (App costs £2.59 or there is a free version).
• SatNav - we already have a TomTom so I haven't actually bought this, but the software is available for the iPhone so that could act as your sat nav system (App costs £59.99).
• Portable DVD player - this is a 'not quite', but we've begun to experiment with loading the iPhone with films for my daughter to watch on trips.
• Laptop - okay, not really, but if, like me, what you mainly do is blog, email and twitter on your laptop then for a short trip away the iPhone is sufficient to act as your computing device

And that is without all the 'normal' convergence you get with just having the internet. In each case the specialist device outshines the iPhone version but the iPhone apps will get better and crucially, it is always there. I remember saying in 1999 that people don't mind carrying separate devices because none of the converged ones were good enough. That's not the case anymore, I think the iPhone has reached the point where they are good enough. And, if you set aside the initial outlay, the cost saving is considerable - most apps are free, 59p or £5.99 at most (the TomTom being the exception). This type of convergence is a result of the generativity Zittrain talks about - opening up (to an extent) the app store has meant that niche developers have filled the gaps previously occupied by separate companies and devices. This isn't confined to the iPhone - we'll see similar with the Android I expect, but it's the example I've seen unfolding before my eyes.

And I believe it acts as a phone as well.

The value of content

It has often occurred to me that TV companies don't make enough of their content, particularly in relation to films. You will often come across a truly great film either sandwiched inbetween soap operas or tucked away at midnight on one of their smaller channels. This was brought home to me again recently when I watched Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time (Redux) on Film 4. It is a sumptuous film (and I haven't seen the original, which film buffs, naturally, say is vastly superior to the Redux version). Watching it I wanted to know more (partly to figure out what was going on, but also because you know it's a film that excites comment), so I browsed the IMDB reference, and also came across these interviews with the director on YouTube.

Now on TV you might get a 10 second introduction from the announcer and that's it. Why couldn't they put together some discussion or analysis programme before a film? They'd be dead cheap to make - you get some film buffs in a room and let them talk. This isn't going to be a massive draw, I accept, but if you trailer it enough it pulls in an extra audience for the film, it makes the showing of the film more of an event. And then you have maybe one of the experts interacting on twitter while the film is showing. Making TV an event is the new name of the game. My feeling though is that broadcasters are generally scared of anything vaguely 'intellectual' and underestimate their audience.

Sports TV has been good at wringing value from its content - as a football fan I used to watch a programme in which Jimmy Hill sat around with four newspaper journalists and they talked about the sports reporting in newspapers for an hour. It has to be the cheapest form of television around, and yet for a certain audience, it's worthwhile.

In a world where content is free and abundant I think there is a bigger message in this, beyond me wanting a film-bore bonanza. So here is my content-value advice: When there is lots of content it makes all content seem devalued, but the way to add value to content is to add more content to it, to provide context and interpretation. And if there isn't something in this for educators, then we're all wasting our time.

A Pedagogy of Abundance take 2

I gave a presentation for George Siemens CCK09 course last night, which explored an idea I had proposed in this blog a while back, on the pedagogy of abundance. I wanted to explore the idea, so talked for half an hour and then we had a good discussion. You can see the recording of the session in Elluminate here.

Below is a slidecast of the presentation. My main argument was that in economics previous models were based on an assumption of scarcity. In a digital world we have abundance and many of these models do not apply. There are two types of response to this, the abundance response which assumes it and the scarcity response which tries to recreate scarcity models in a digital format. Freemium is an example of the former and DRM an example of the latter. I then explore whether there are similar arguments to be made for pedagogy based on the following assumptions:

• Content is free
• Content is abundant
• Content is varied
• Sharing is easy
• Social based
• Connections are lite
• Organisation is cheap
• Based on a generative system
• Crowdsourcing
• Network is valuable

A pedagogy of abundance

View more presentations from mweller.

Remote conference participation - flash debate

<Image Waiting for it all to begin by Unhindered by Talent http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicmcphee/2380602382/>

One of the things I am interested in is the subtle ways in which new technology begins to alter standard practice over time, and without these changes being planned. In the academic world I think the conference is one such area. The academic conference can be seen as one of the core practices in higher education. It achieves many vital functions in academic practice, including:

• Knowledge sharing - you get to present and listen to other talks
• Validation - by sharing research and ideas within a subject community you get validation
• Networking - you establish a network of peers
• Recognition - publishing conference papers is often a first step for researchers to publishing papers and are recognised outputs
• Socialising - slightly different from networking, there is a social element to conferences which make them enjoyable

Over the past few years remote participation has become more commonplace. By remote participation I don't mean solely online conferences, but rather the sort of vicarious, casual participation many of us undertake. This type of participation is often unofficial, and uses low key, free technology. It is often a hybrid of the following examples:

• Twitter hashtags
• Live streaming (whether official or via an individual)
• Blogging
• Live-blogging
• Video/audio updates
• Flickr streams
• Slideshare presentations
• Cloudworks/Friendfeed aggregations

There are a few things that interest me about this. The first is how does it change the nature of the conference to have this broader participation? Secondly, how can conference organisers and presenters best take advantage of it and incorporate it into the conference? Thirdly, what is the experience like for the remote participant compared with the 'real thing'? For this last question, I have created a quick 5 question survey to get a feeling for how remote participation compares with real attendance.

I think there is a lot to discuss here, so I have set up a space in cloudworks for a flash debate. I'd be interested in your thoughts on any of the three questions above, or other opinions. Of course you can add comments here too - I'll post them over in Cloudworks also.