The Ed Techie

With friends like these, musicians don't need enemies

Nothing in this post is new, but I had a reminder of the idiocy of copyright today. I got a message from YouTube telling me my Edupunk video had been blocked because of a copyright claim. The account read:

"Your video, Edupunk, may have audio content from Anarchy In The U.K. by Sex Pistols that is owned or licensed by WMG."

Well, I can't argue, that is obviously true. But let's examine the logic of this and ask a few questions:

Question 1: "Is it likely that my use of Anarchy in the UK as the soundtrack to an ed tech video will damage sales? Will anyone who was going to buy it, now not do so, because they have my video?"
Answer: No, the opposite is probably true, someone may be reminded they don't have it and purchase it.

Question 2:  Am I, an individual likely to pay them for usage?
Answer: No, it's non-c0mmercial use, I am not going to be the type of licence fees set out for a commercial world.

Question 3: Are the artists harmed in any way?
Answer: Not as far as I can see. The use of the song to accompany the visuals surely creates something new, which they would never have intended. So, I am not stopping them from doing something they were likely to do.

Question 4: Am I profiting from this in any way?
Answer: No, not really unless being slagged off by Donald Clark counts (and in a way, it does).

Question 5: Isn't there something rather ironic in this song in particular being locked down this way?
Answer: Hell yes!

These questions (apart from no 5) seem like the type of ones artists and copyrighters should be asking in a digital age. Their preference though is to that no-one sees my video, even though, as I suggest above, the impact is at worst negligible and at best, positive to sales.

Oh well, there's always Blip.Tv.

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The punk zine approach

The Leisurely Historian has a nice post on what education can learn from the punk zine movement, which flourished around the time of punk. One could also expand it to any fanzine movement really (football fanzines would be another good example), where the DIY ethos makes them more valuable to a certain audience than the glossy, formal productions.

He lists several things we can learn, which I'll touch upon, but you should read his post:

• All you need is Sharpies, tape, and a Xerox machine - ie a lot can be achieved with relatively low resource. For a zine this meant you didn't need an expensive printing press. For an educator this is even more relevant with the proliferation of free tools. You don't need a corporate VLE, or an enterprise licence for broadcast, you can create it yourself from various tools and embed them in a blog.
• Fast and ugly is better than slow and pretty. This is probably another way of thinking of the perpetual beta, and also to move away from thinking everything has to be broadcast quality. Learners will often trade relevance and currency for quality of production, eg they'd prefer a regular vodcast that really helped them with their studies to a BBC programme that was interesting, but tangential.
• Don’t cover what your audience can find elsewhere - oh, how relevant this is for education. This might be the biggest lesson educators have to learn over the next few years. In a pre-digital, pre -internet age the educator did cover everything (supplemented by books and articles), but now there really isn't any need now to provide most of the content. Instead it is the process of link, embed, interpret and provide structure that an online educator adopts.
• Change things up when they get boring, but stay consistent enough that people can find you. This could again be a take on the perpetual beta approach. It isn't necessary to engage in a long user consultation exercise before undergoing a radical overhaul of design, you can change elements and if people don't like them, change back.
• There’s always some lonely kid in rural Iowa who needs to hear what you’ve got to say. Read: Long Tail. In a global education market, and if the cost of course production is low enough (because you're using free tools and content), then you can find an audience. The Semiotics of Soccer anyone?
• Make friends with a disgruntled Kinko’s employee. By this, he means zines used to get friends in offices to do photocopying for them. In the case of edtech it means take advantage of the free stuff available.

A little corner that is forever edupunk

Last night I was part of a live internet radio show, run by Graham Attwell at Pontydysgu. The theme was edupunk, and the show featured Jim Groom and Mike Caulfield amongst others.

I made the point that edupunk is a sort of metaphor, and like all metaphors we only map certain parts across to the new domain - in this case I thought it was the DIY, have-a-go approach of punk, and some of the anarchic nature of it. What we wouldn't want to map across was the slightly Stalinist approach that came with punk where people were either punk or not, and anything that was not was decreed rubbish.

And this made me think about some of the angst people have had about the term - it's seen as an either/or. Are you an edupunk or not? As I stated a while ago, I don't think I am, too much of what I do is just mundane or corporate or conservative in approach. But it struck me that it's not about being an edupunk, but rather preserving some area of what you do where you can do edupunk kinda stuff - or eduWomble, or research, or play, or social networking, whatever you want to call it. Just as Google has Google Time when employees can experiment with stuff, so universities and educators need to have edupunk time - a period when you can explore stuff away from the mass of concerns that arise whenever you try and do anything with education: learning objectives, accessibility, workloads, technical expertise, cost implications, etc. All of these are important, but sometimes you need room to explore in an area that is free from having to meet a wide range of criteria at the outset.

So new management proposal - 10% edupunk time for all. Any takers?

Future of content vid with annotations

Accusations of flogging dead horses may well be justified, but just in case you thought my Future of Content was some randomly assembled clips, the annotated version is now up on YouTube (again you have to click through to see the annotations).

So, I've now done the article, made a video of it, then added textual annotation to explain the video. Erm, full circle anyone? Still, you do now have a choice of medium.

The eduWomble manifesto

For those who have difficulties with the connotations of edupunk, straight of Wales we bring you - eduWomble! One of my twitter friends Griffithss4 tweeted yesterday that regarding their learning environment

"Current approach can be summarised (and will be referred to) as the #'Womble Strategy"

For those outside the UK, the Wombles was a children's television programme set on Wimbledon Common about creatures who lived underground and made their homes and stuff by recycling the rubbish humans left around. The green message was very ahead of its time, but it's the theme tune that offers itself up to us educational technologists as metaphor.

The main theme is represented in the lyrics by "Making good use of the things that we find/Things that the everyday folks leave behind." For the modern educational technologist this means using non-educational applications in educational settings. It also applies to content - as I argued in the YouTube annotations post, what commentary allows you to do is to take any resource and make it an educational one, and what digital content allows you to do is find and locate any resource. So an average photo becomes part of a digital storytelling class, a clip from a 50s TV series part of a commentary on changing architectural styles, a Sex Pistols track a theme tune for RSS, and so on. We're making good use of the things people leave behind.

A second theme is that of the loosely coupled nature of the educational technologist. Obviously this applies to our use of applications, but also our network. We all belong to different types of network (e.g. I sort of belong to networks such as 'The OU', 'The OU plus associated people', 'UK edubloggers', 'The Canadian/US eduglu affiliation', etc). These are bottom up, but still highly effective networks. Here the lyrics do the Clay Shirky by stating " Wombles are organized, work as a team."

Another theme is that of change management by stealth. Here the lyrics remind us that " People don't notice us, they never see/Under their noses a Womble may be." And furthermore that " We're so incredibly, utterly devious/Making the most of everything". This sounds like Injenuity in Viral Professional Development mode.

And just to reiterate the reuse, mashup agenda the lyrics end with " Pick up the pieces and make them into something new/Is what we do!". Surely written with Tony in mind?

Recently David Wiley asked if we should have something akin to a carbon footprint for education, which calculated how much you reused material. The status one should aspire to is eduWomble.

Here are the lyrics in full:

Underground, Overground, Wombling Free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we.
Making good use of the things that we find,
Things that the everyday folks leave behind.

Uncle Bulgaria,
He can remember the days when he wasn't behind The Times,
With his map of the World.
Pick up the papers and take them to Tobermory!

Wombles are organized, work as a team.
Wombles are tidy and Wombles are clean.
Underground, Overground, wombling free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we!

People don't notice us, they never see,
Under their noses a Womble may be.
We womble by night and we womble by day,
Looking for litter to trundle away.

We're so incredibly, utterly devious
Making the most of everything.
Even bottles and tins.
Pick up the pieces and make them into something new,
Is what we do!

The future of content - the eduVJ mix

Tony has posted a follow up to his original vid, so in the spirit of friendly competition, I'd best follow suit. I have taken my Future of Content post and done an eduVJ (as Patrick dubbed it) mix. I'm not sure it works as well as the first one, mainly because this is trying to make more of an academic point, so maybe the fit to the song isn't as neat.

I'm enjoying doing these though, and this one taught me some more about using Camtesia (such as save your file because it might crash out half way through). The last one was a Camtesia recording of Powerpoint, this one was all done in Camtesia. I hope you'll forgive this experimenting in public approach, it's a good way of learning.

Anyway, here it is, I'll do a YouTube annotated version later too, but this is the Blip.TV one:

YouTube annotations (on edupunk video)

YouTube now allows you to add annotations to your uploaded videos. It's very easy to do (to go back to my previous post, another example of lowering the 'cost' to the user). So, I took my edupunk video, and added some annotations, see below.

What adding comments does is potentially transform any video into an educational one. Much of teaching can be seen as providing commentary, analysis and interpretation on the world. YouTube annotation allows this second order decoding. If you combine that with the discussion permitted by comments and you've suddenly got a pretty compelling learning application. At the moment (I don't know if there are plans to change this), you can only add annotations to your own, uploaded videos. It would be much more powerful for educators if you could add annotations to other videos.

So here is my edupunk video with annotations. By adding these comments it changes from being a jokey nod to some of the people involved and edges closer to being an edupunk 101, ie you could use it to introduce the concept to novices now, in a way you probably couldn't with the original. You have a comparison now, the original unannotated version on Blip.tv and the annotated version on YouTube. I prefer it without comments, since any humour that may have been present in the original is destroyed by explanation. But the latter is a better teaching device.

[I've just tested this and despite what YouTube says, the embedded version seems to lose the annotation - click on the vid to go to YouTube where the annotations do work]

D'Arcy's Camus moment

D'Arcy Norman recently 'nuked' his blog, ie he took it all down and replaced it with the image of a nuclear explosion (he missed a fine opportunity for RickRolling there). As he says

"At first, I was just doing it to make a point, but I quickly reached a point where I was almost convinced I was going to leave it nuked. I was going to toss the albatross overboard...But my blog is strictly just a bunch of words. Just a bunch of talk."

This came on the back of some of the edupunk stuff and backlash which has rather gotten bogged down in dissecting the term. Interestingly, punk itself was accused of being nihilistic, and once you've said 'destroy' there's not much else to do (which is why I ended my edupunk vid with 'Create'). It put me in mind of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, which opens with this line

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."

He argues that a search for meaning and deity is absurd, and once we realise this, suicide is a logical conclusion:

"The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd"

(as a scientist and an educator I disagree with Camus - seeking knowledge and understanding of how things work is itself a solution to the absurd, but that's not the point of this post).

D'Arcy, like many writers, came to the same dilemma. Writing, blogging, suddenly seemed absurd, devoid of meaning. And the solution? Blogicide.

But he came back (unlike real suicide, blogicide is reversable). And that shows us that ultimately, even in the face of the absurd, the need to keep communicating is what keeps us going. I'm glad he reversed his decision, because I need someone to steal ideas from.

One for the Edupunkers

I wasn't going to post on Jim's Edupunk stuff because although I think it's spot-on, it made me feel slightly left out, and too corporate (Edupunk's don't concern themselves with things like business models). I'm not radical enough to be part of it. This was a purely personal reaction, I applaud the notion of remixing, DIY edtech, openness, etc.  I sit on things like steering committees, produce papers and write research bids after all. I may not be the Man, but I'm on nodding terms with him.

But then I watched Tony's presentation on publishing, data and copyright and felt positively inspired. I don't use this word lightly (except when talking about football) - genius.

So, I offer up the following as a homage to all the edupunkers out there. Such an obvious Hirst rip-off may be the equivalent of a middle-aged man wearing leather trousers, but even if I'm not an edupunk, like original punk, we all benefit from the changes they make to the scene. Enjoy:

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