The Ed Techie

Booing as legitimate protest

(Warning: Mainly football related post)

There was some fuss at the weekend that Arsenal fans booed one of their own players, Eboue, to the point where he had to be substituted. Most of the pundits have been outraged, and the common complaint is that it is counter-productive, as well as vicious. Not being an Arsenal fan, I don't really know the history, but my guess is there is some background as to why they booed Eboue, and it wasn't just a random attack. Football fans may have a mob mentality but it is a highly contextualised mob mentality.

A few months ago, a similar event occurred during an England game when fans booed Ashley Cole after his error led to a goal. There was again a lot of self-righteous indignation from players and pundits, here is Graeme Le Saux in The Telegraph:

Their behaviour was nothing short of a disgrace. Treating one of your own like that doesn't benefit anyone. Not only will it affect Ashley, but that feeling will spread to the rest of the team. The mistake he made with his lobbed back-pass was a bad one and nobody will have been more painfully aware of that than Ashley.

What these commentators fail to mention is that this is probably a result of the way footballers have distanced themselves from fans. In his autobiography, Cole famously said that when a new offer of £60,000 per week came in from his agent to stay at Arsenal he pulled over to the side of the road and yelled in the phone:

"60 grand a week, they're taking the p**s Jonathan."

And what is particularly telling is that he relates this tale, expecting sympathy. In this context they have effectively severed the relationship with fans, and thus the likes of Rio Ferdinand and Graeme Le Saux have no legitimate claim on fans' loyalty. The behaviour of the fans is not as stupid as they like to paint it - they are trying to send you a very clear warning: Lose the community that creates you, and even when things appear great, you will have to pay in the long run.

I personally wouldn't boo, and feel it shouldn't be used lightly, but I'll make this prediction: Booing at matches will become increasingly common, and commentators will continue to dismiss it as the action of a small-minded minority. They should instead interpret it as a siren warning - football fans are trapped, you can't change allegiance, but you can fall out of love, and it is this love that pays those wages ultimately.

What has this got to do with education? Well, maybe not much, I can verify that Professors do not earn football player type salaries, nor do they have the adulation of thousands. While we may not see booing in lectures, we should be conscious of the equivalent signals in higher education. We do not have the same relationship with students as football teams do with fans, but higher education is generally tolerated, indulged and often viewed affectionately and respectfully by society (not by all sectors I agree). The dangers of failing to be relevant, of sticking to traditional methods, of refusing to listen and being aloof are the same as those that face footballers - we will undermine the foundation of our existence. Listen for those sirens...

Gordon Brown is the Steve McLaren of politics

I don't 'do politics' in this blog usually, but really, the analogy is too good to pass up. Look at the similarities:

• Both were second in commands
• Both took over from someone who had been in post for a long time.
• Both of their predecessors left on a wave of unpopularity
• Both enjoyed brief periods of (unexpected) success.
• Both then made a series of strategic errors

I think the foot and mouth outbreak was Gordon's draw with Macedonia, the election that never was his away defeat to Croatia, and this week's armed forces attack his away defeat to Russia. If the analogy is to be played out in full, that means by my reckoning he only has a catastrophic home defeat to Croatia left before they start looking for a successor. Wonder what it could be?

Football commentators, elearning and the legitimacy deficit

There was much discussion last week about the BBC appointing its first female commentator on Match of the Day.  Rather predictably this assault on the last bastion of maleness caused some debate. The ant-argument seems to fall in to three camps:

i) She hasn't played the game and you need to have done so in order to be a good commentator. This is just plain wrong and like many fields confuses experience with critical prowess. Many good literary reviewers are not good authors and vice versa, the same goes for film, and most of the printed press in any sport. Indeed I have been rather disappointed with the rise of ex-players having a monopoly over punditry and analysis at the BBC. This is because a) they can't fight their way out of a cliche bag and b) they're often not removed enough from the sport to bring other insights. Sure, a commentator needs to be knowledgeable, but you can gain that from other means. After all, do most football fans think their own viewpoint is useless because they haven't played professionally?

ii) The female voice is not appropriate for football commentary. Hmmm, this one seems to have had too much of an airing, for example Irish-Le-Faux suggests "I don't think the female voice is equipped to commentate on football due to the high pitched nature of it". Now, obviously not all female voices are the same, but even if we accept there is general a higher pitch, this doesn't mean they are incapable of expressing excitement without screaming. I, like many footie fans, find the ranty-shouty type commentator pretty unbearable, for example Jonathan Pearce seems to reach a crescendo of excitement and volume while the team walk out of the tunnel and has nowhere left to go when things do exciting (not very likely with England playing, admittedly) without descending in to some guttural scream. Now maybe this gets at the primal appeal of sport for some people, and I accept people will have preferences, but to issue an edict against any female commentators seems ludicrous.

What all this reminded me of is the notion of a legitimacy deficit. Note that a legitimacy deficit doesn't have to be real (ie that female commentators are really not as good as men), but rather it just has to be perceived, either by the wider public or by the individual themselves (they think I'm not as good). Now legitimacy deficits are something I know about - I work for the Open University, which when it was founded had to overcome an enormous legitimacy deficit regarding the quality and validity of distance learning. I have been involved in the early adoption of e-learning, which again faced the same sorts of criticisms (indeed often the exact same ones, but with the words 'distance learning' replaced by 'e-learning' - and sometimes from distance educators!).  And I encounter the same sort of deficit with web 2.0 stuff now - e.g. it's not for education, it's just hype, what about the serious pedagogy?, etc.

One of the good things about a legitimacy deficit is that it often makes the person, group or organisation on the end of it work extra hard to overcome it. This has the result that their output is often better than the standard offering. For example, the OU's teaching quality is ranked in the top ten in the UK (although the downside is that having worked so hard to get this legitimacy it makes some people reluctant to risk it, and thus an element of risk aversion sets in). There are many examples of it in history - because of the rather dubious manner in which he inherited the title of emperor, Charlemagne suffered something of a legitimacy deficit which may have been the reason behind many of his cultural reforms, including the Carolingian Renaissance. Of course, the reaction to a legitimacy deficit can be negative also, particularly when it is to convince others of your legitimacy by strength (ahem, George Bush springs to mind).

In educational technology here is my 'legitimacy deficit' top ten:

1. Open educational resources - whether this approach is sustainable, desirable, viable, etc.
2. User generated content - need I say more? You know the arguments.
3. Social software - is this just for entertainment or serious education?
4. ePortfolios - an eportfolio based approach has enormous implications for institutions but whether it will be accepted by learners, universities and employers is up for debate.
5. Informal learning - communities of practice, open source activity, etc. How do we map this across and recognise it?
6. PLEs - I've covered this before.
7. VLEs - although pervasive you would have to say they haven't fully overcome the legitimacy deficit, and a lot of the criticism comes from e-learning advocates who feel they are just not up to the job.
8. e-learning - yes, it's still there, down four from last year.
9. Podcasts, wikis, blogs - okay, kind of covered user generated content but there is something about this group where the legitimacy deficit is about the validity of academic debate that takes place, and whether these are the new journals.
10. [Insert your own one here]

Being in the legitimacy deficit zone is a good place to be though - this is where the excitement is, so if you're involved in any of the above remember that such deficits can be overcome and the outcome is often all the better for having that struggle. And good luck Jaqui Oatley too!

The irrationality of preference

Having posted about Google desktop and Netvibes it made me consider why Netvibes is my preferred personal portal. There are many others available and while I could come up with a justification for Netvibes over Pageflakes, say, it would all be a bit post hoc. In a recent survey on VLE use in universities the OECD pointed out that

"there was little to choose between different systems. The past seven years of intensive LMS development and adoption in tertiary education have seen considerable system convergence…. Some respondents asserted that a particular system was the “only genuine” enterprise LMS, or “by far the easiest” to use, but it was difficult to evidence such claims. "

I think in some ways we choose software on a much less rational basis than we might like to admit, and rather like our choice of football team (or religion if you prefer), this very irrationality of selection makes us defend our choice more vigorously. Having made a selection free from logic, we are then able to indulge it at an emotional level. I have often been struck by how emotionally attached people are to particular software packages. When deciding on a particular piece of software to use for a project or course I have found myself in very heated debates, which pretend to be about functionality, or database compatibility, but are in fact about personal identity, emotional attachment, love even. Within particular functions we tend to be monoamorous, so you only love one browser/operating system, etc. We can be happily be polyamorous across different functions ie you can love an operating system and a browser.

The analogy with football is too tempting (and obvious) for me to pass up. You have to be monoamorous supporting a team at one level (any football fan that tells you they support Arsenal and Chelsea say is by definition, not a football fan and deserves your contempt). But you can be polyamorous across different levels, e.g. you can support one national team, one main team and maybe your local non-league team also. I'm being slightly flippant here, but there does seem to be a similar process in operation - it may be an evolutionary tick, the process for promoting monogamy to secure the succession of your genes latching on to other aspects in life also.

And then you have to produce a 20 page business case for a committee that incorporates your software choice in an objective manner...

Why you should love Zidane

Watched the world cup final last night which was of course marred/made memorable by Zidane's headbutt and red card. I've been puzzling about this. He was about ten minutes away from being remembered as the greatest French player ever, probably overtaking Platini. And I think that is the key to his action. He could see the endless smug after dinner speeches, the fawning chat show appearances, the publicity work with Blatter and Chirac. It was a frightening epiphany. So he committed reputation suicide. Now he can enjoy his retirement in peace. You've got to admire that. More people should do it I think and save themselves from a kind of self-congratulatory purgatory.

The constraint of choice (and a dodgy football analogy)

Watching England play on Saturday made me think about VLEs (that is not a sentence many people will write I expect). Whether that was an indication of my current VLE monomania as I complete the book, or an indictment of the quality of the game, I'm not sure. All football fans suffer from the 'football as a metaphor for anything' complaint, and here is another. I appreciate that to actually understand the analogy you need to have a good grasp of both VLEs and football, so it fails the first test of being a useful means of explaining one topic by mapping to another, but hey, how often do you get to talk about service oriented architectures and Steven Gerrard in the same post?

One of England's problems has been an embarrassment of riches in midfield (VLE people stick with me for a bit). They have both Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, both of who are attacking midfielders. But when they are placed together they curb their natural appetite to go forward with the result that neither plays as well as they do for their clubs. Eriksson has been paralysed by his options here and always plays both (one feels that if he had been the England manager in the early 80s he would have played Shilton in goal and Clemence at right back to avoid choosing between the two). The tough decision would be to play a holding midfielder, who isn't as good as either, and allow the remaining one full scope. The argument being that it's better to have 100% of either than 50% of both. It would probably be a blessing for England if one of them got injured and thus forced this change.

And now, onto the VLE bit. Well, not just VLEs, but any software, and maybe even strategic decision. What the England situation demonstrates is that choice is not always liberating. When we were considering VLE options for the OU, we knew that a full service oriented architecture was the most appropriate, but were concerned that such an implementation would get mired in debate as to the best way to achieve it. Choosing an open source option, in our case Moodle, is a good compromise here, since it overcomes much of that debate - you have to do things the Moodle way. One loses some choice, because you are constrained to doing things the Moodle way, but that actually saves you a lot of time. It is akin to one of Gerrard/Lampard being injured but the balance of the team benefiting as a result.

There, I'm glad I've got that out of my system. Tomorrow - the link between Ronaldinho and social bookmarking....

Watching england abroad

Today England play their first game in the world cup. I was determined to find a bar in Como to watch the game. Being a footballing country I thought this would be easy, but after an hour of trudging round Como I began to suspect their passion in this region. I asked in every bar if they would be showing the football and they greeted the request politely, but with an element of confusion, as if I'd gone into a hairdressers and asked for a bacon sandwich.

It's interesting how you take so many things for granted. Yesterday I was thinking Como represented some type of apogee of civilisation - quiet, sedate, polite and cultured. As my search today grew more frantic as kick-off approached I could be heard muttering indignantly as if watching football on TV were some kind of right that no person should be denied.

Eventually I found one bar that was showing the game. I was ushered upstairs to watch it. Initially I only had an edgy alcoholic of indeterminate origins for company, but gradually a few English supporters made their way upstairs, blinking as they too stumbled across this oasis in the desert of sporting television. We shared experiences and for the coming two hours were bonded together, our enjoyment increased by the struggle that had preceded it - well, we nodded politely to each other, but I like to think that's what we conveyed.

As it turned out the game was rubbish, England dull, and the whole thing forgettable.