The Ed Techie

Academic output as collateral damage

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Learning on Screen conference, which was hosted at the OU, with the title of 'Academic output as collateral damage.' The talk arose from two recent events: the first was the public engagement day at the OU, which I felt was a bit old media and didn't really address the idea of academics producing digital outputs as part of their everyday practice. Jonathan Sanderson commented on 'public engagement as collateral damage', which was too good a phrase not to pinch. The second was the slidecast I produced for George Siemens and Dave Cormier's course, which both explored these issues a bit more and was also an example of the type of output I had in mind.

The (poor audio quality) slidecast is below:

Academic output as collateral damage

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

My main points were that you can view higher education as a long tail content production system. And if you are producing this stuff as a by-product of what you do anyway then a host of new possibilities open up. You can embrace unpredictability - which if you are spending £1000s on a TV series you don't want, but online unpredictability is a good thing, it's where all the innovation comes from. But most importantly I think it means we can do things we couldn't do before - George and Dave's open course is an example of this and we've only just begun to explore the possibilities that this new relationship with content affords.

Is public engagement an old media concept?

"In many ways the Roman Forum was a bit like a Lady Gaga concert..."

The OU hosted an event today, in collaboration with the BBC and the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement called 'Engaging citizens: media, research and the public'. It was an interesting day with presentations from the excellent Mary Beard, the BBC's Martin Davidson and Tristram Hunt from Queen Mary's. All the speakers were engaging and talked about the relationship between academics and media and some of the tensions and benefits collaboration brought.

In the panel session the issue of public engagement and particularly reach came up, and how could we get to 'non-BBC' audiences. Mary Beard gave a good answer, saying that she is a Classicist, she usually speaks to a hundred or so people, if she can make a programme that reaches thousands, then that's a win, and she'd 'worry about their postcodes' later. Which is I think the right attitude, no matter what you do, not everyone is going to be interested in classical history. Tristram Hunt used a quote from Bush's presidential campaign, that of 'the soft bigotry of low expectations', in this context to suggest that we dumb down or transform content to meet a middle class perception of the needs of others, only succeeding in patronising them.

But what all of this set me thinking was that the whole concept of 'public engagement' seems very rooted in traditional media. It has as its assumption a control of what is 'put out there' and thus a need to ensure that it meets the needs of the public. Public engagement becomes an issue because of economics - it costs lots of money to make traditional broadcast and so you have to a) demonstrate value for money by engaging 'the public' and b) need to meet as many different audiences with the same piece of content as possible.

If we switch to a new media (I know,I know - when will it stop being new?), then these two restrictions disappear, or diminish anyway. This is particularly true if we adopt a 'low friction' model of production from academic activity - we make slidecasts of talks, video interviews, lectures, podcasts, blog posts and put papers up online. Any one piece of output is not likely to engage all of the public, but some will, and they will engage small, interested groups. 

This is classic Long Tail distribution - lots of content, each piece of which appeals to only a few individuals, but the cumulative effect is that of engagement. And academic work produces lots of content - it can almost be seen as a Long Tail content production system. This view may also remove some of the tensions in the academic - broadcast relationship: there is no requirement to appeal to a mass audience.

There will undoubtedly still be a place for academics who are good on TV and radio, but this provides an alternative view of public engagement. If we were to think of how you could get better public engagement around this type of content then the focus would shift - it might not be about content but about tools, or promotion, or community.  

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.

Connections are more meaningful in the long tail

I can't remember if Chris Anderson made this point, but it came home to me the other day. When you are operating with blockbusters then the connections you make are pretty meaningless since these artists or products have become a commodity, there is very little chance of overlap with other tastes.

Let's take an example of music - I don't really listen to a lot of hip hop/rap (hey, I'm a Smiths fan, what do you expect?) but I like a bit of Kanye West. However, looking up Kanye on iTunes is not really going to find me artists who are similar to him - it wouldn't be a good starting point to get into more rap. This is because he is a popular artist and so the other artists people buy aren't really like him at all. Take a look:

Believe me, I am not going to like any of the similar artists listed here - content discovery in blockbusters breaks down, because the overlap with other content becomes too spread out, so you end up linking only to other blockbusters. But now let's consider a more long tail artist, say the excellent Sufjan Stevens. Now look at the similar artists in iTunes:

I already know and like Midlake, and through this route have discovered Bonnie Prince Billy who has turned out to be a great find, and will check the others also. Content discovery becomes meaningful in the long tail because there is greater similarity between the content.

And the same applies for networking - if I find that someone likes Jaws say, then even though it is one of my favourite films, I wouldn't hold much hope that the other films the person likes would also be of interest. I like Jaws because I consider to be the perfect film in terms of structure and pacing, (and, yes because I like sharks too) but  other people will like it for many different reasons because it will have reached a level of penetration in society that has many different routes to it. But, if we take the Korean horror film, A Tale of Two Sisters, then if I find someone who likes that, I will be much more likely to take their recommendation for other films (the content discovery element), but more importantly, I would probably find dialogue with them more useful aslo.

So what might this mean for education? For a start if we are to encourage content discovery then it shows we need a long tail of educational content. We need a wide range of resources that suit different styles, use different pedagogies and incorporate different media. Even with the investment in OERs we don't have this quantity of content yet.

It also illustrates that if we want to encourage networking between learners, then we need to find tools that help them make meaningful connections. Just being a psychology student isn't sufficient, it will be a mixture of very specific subject interests, plus personal information that will help learners find study buddies who are appropriate.

New university model

I was at a meeting yesterday hosted by the OU which was exploring new models for the OU, and by implication higher education in general. There were some big hitters there including Stephen Heppell, Stowe Boyd, Jamais Cascio and Stuart Sim.

The resulting suggestion was a social space, with the emphasis on helping others to learn. Such a space is populated by remixable, flexible content and also by learning narratives that guide learners and a range of social connections such as mentors, peers, experts, etc. None of this is particularly surprising given the people there - the solution wasn't going to be a physical campus with lectures now was it.

The critical mass issue was significant for me. Such a system is very long tail - it meets the needs of the few people who want to learn about Ukrainian knitting patterns, radio programmes of the 1950s, the novels of William Boyd and the influence of Krazy Kat cartoons on modern culture. This is good, because such needs aren't met in any current system, but it really needs a large mass to support. And this is where the Catch 22 is - if you have the critical mass the system works well, but the system doesn't function until you get the critical mass. Sites such as YouTube could afford to be a bit more experimental, and just let their system grow since the investment on the part of the user was small. They could also populate it reasonably quickly with a mass of music videos. Learning is more complex, and thus getting the good content and the right connections is more difficult to establish.

Also, although the social networking stuff is important, I think the significance of content is underplayed in such a vision (I even got to use my 'content may not be everything' jibe I mentioned yesterday). For a lot of social networking sites, such as LastFM people don't go there primarily for the social networking, what they go for is the content (ie to be able to listen to a good range of music). This is enhanced (and to some extent enabled) by the network effects. In short they go for the content and stay for the social networking.

Anyway, I noticed a strange thing happening during the meeting. Normally my role is to be web 2.0/elearning/new technology evangelist, but in a room where I was an amateur at the evangelism stuff, I took on the 'devils advocate' role. Sometimes to my horror I found myself offering obstacles to the realisation of such a system. Why does this happen? So just for the record, I do believe such a system is viable (I just have a list of 'buts').

My Amazon ranking - whipped by the long tail

Looking at your books ranking in Amazon can be a mildly obsessive pastime, like checking your Technorati rating (465,937 since you ask). In Amazon yesterday I had risen to the giddy heights of 9,432. To put that in context Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is 97, Moby Dick is 1,428 and Perec's Life A User Manual is 639,483.

But before I could purchase the yacht, it seems my fantasies of retirement were scuppered by the long tail. Sales fall off very quickly after the first 1000 or so, as this article explains. So at around 10,000 it is selling 11 copies every 5 days. It'd have to be a pretty small yacht under those circumstances. And this seems to have been a peak (probably a couple of friends bought a copy out of pity), as today I am at 63,108. Of course it would be a very sad person indeed who looked up how the books of their colleagues were doing, so you won't catch me doing that, oh no.

(Thanks to Chris Pegler for the link).

Some long tail in education thoughts

The Long Tail concept crops up in a few things I am working on, such as the broadcast strategy, and web 2.0 approaches to content, so here are some thoughts on what it means in education (primarily distance and e-learning).

• New course economics. If the blockbuster is dead (or at least not as significant as it was), then the Fordist model of distance education course production needs revising. There has been talk of a post-Fordist model for a long time, but I think we haven't really changed the model fundamentally. In a long tail world lots of small population courses might be the way to go, which means the economics of course production and presentation need to change, for example to a more flexible model built around aggregation.
• Specific is better than popular. If you use a site built on recommendations, data mining and networking, for example LastFM or Amazon, then the less popular searches generate much more useful connections. Popular titles don't generate hits that are relevant to you because the people who buy/rate them like a wide variety of stuff, and because the popular titles might not be that representative of your tastes. And so it would be in learning, for example 'Evolution' won't get you far as a search term, but 'language evolution' will be better, and 'language evolution in primates' might be better still. In education terms then the question is how the learner is helped/scaffolded to get to the stage when they can start finding valuable resources, and then the framework within which those resources make sense.
• It strengthens the case for personalisation. In a world where I have my own personal radio or TV station the expectation of having material that I select is raised. Being provided with one set of resources only which may not suit my needs or preferences will seem increasingly stifling. Although this will still need to address many of the issues around personalisation in education, such as what it does to the cohort and how do you assess it, but it's another nail in the one-size-fits-all coffin.
• Course design is about aggregation and activity. In a long tail world the educator can aggregate a wide variety of very specific content together easily enough. The content itself is only half the story though and what matters is the (dare I say it) learning design. Pre-long tail the content itself was more significant because it carried the information to everyone. So this is where the effort went, which meant that a lot of pedagogy didn't go much beyond 'read this - now discuss it.' But if you are drawing on a wide range of content then the effort goes in to creating, and supporting, activities around that content.
• Uniformity is not important, diversity is the norm. When creating courses there is often a temptation to write everything yourself, to provide a uniform voice. The idea is that it helps the student to have a consistent tone. But, building on the previous point, this consistency is provided by the support. In the long tail world the user is accustomed to a diversity of resources as they seek out ones that suit them rather than just accepting the popular choices.