The Ed Techie

Future of content - part 3

Patrick McAndrew has posted part 3 of our distributed debate. It's a personal case study based on his experience with the openlearn project. Below are my observations on it.

On the motivation for openlearn:

Some of those reasons are complex, but underneath it I think there are two principles one altruistic and one more selfish:

Altruistic reason for open content: there is more value in having the world see this resource than if we store it away or try to sell it

Selfish reason for open content: if we don’t do it someone else will, and then what are we left with

Obviously altruism is great, but ultimately I think it's unsustainable. My arguments about content becoming free weren't based on an altruistic, utopian view, but just on what I think will happen as a consequence of content being digital and online. So although Patrick labels it a selfish reason, it could be termed a realistic reason also - this is what is happening and we need to understand it and find alternative income streams, or ways of competing in this world before it's too late to change. 

Deciding that content itself might not be what you should value could lead to a fresher model of how to work, and help match behaviour to suit the changing times. [At this point I should provide a wonderful analogy in terms of some past industry that changed or failed to change (such as the rat fur traders of old London Town who failed to pay attention to who was getting the blame for the Plague) but I will leave that for the world or your imagination to supply one that is not made up!]

The encyclopedia business is a good one. Britannica ignored Encarta, and almost overnight disappeared, largely because they were focused on keeping their sales employees happy, and too rooted in the tradition of their product. They were right that a complete set of Britannica is a nicer thing to own than a CD from Microsoft, but they were wrong that the motivation to buy Britannica would remain, which was usually 'it's for your children'. Encarta was good enough for the kids and Britannica's model collapsed. 

This seems to be becoming the new conventionalism and social actions (nearly wrote socialism but that would not do) are seen as the be all and end all: community is king. Actually while content is not king, it is not nothing. Similarly while community is important it is not everything to everybody. I find myself here having to switch my own arguments from the need to build as little content as possible to one where the content can feed in from all directions. We are in a more connected world and the connections can be social but they can also be independent, what I believe that should not be is unnecessarily protected.

I know what Patrick means here, and readers may know I like using the 'content may not be everything, but that doesn't mean it's nothing' line. While arguing that content will become free doesn't mean that I think it is unimportant, just that it's economic value is decreasing. And for all my admiration of Facebook et al, I'm not always social, and just going through content independently is what I want to do.

I would like to add a warning though that a free and open world is not necessarily entirely Utopian. The confusing impact of Internet economics and global sharing means we need to watch out that we do not lose things we value along the way to openness

He's spot on here - both Ray and Patrick have termed my view utopian, but it wasn't meant to be. If you work in a content industry it's positively dystopian. The pay for content model is quite simple, but just how money is made in the 2.0 world is not entirely clear. It may be a more ruthless world, with no time or spare capacity for some of the luxuries we enjoy now (such as academics blogging)

Future of content - Pt 2 response

Ray Corrigan has responded to my first piece on the Future of Content over on his blog. His is an excellent article, reminding us of the influence of big corporations and setting out the reasons why my view might not come to pass. I recommend reading it all.

For now, here are my responses to some of the points he makes.

"Barlow's meme has often been taken to mean that we should rely on technology and geography and NOT laws, judges or politicians, to protect freedom of speech. Well government censorship of the Net in places like Saudi Arabia and large responsibility for fingering journalists for arrest in China have provided stark indications of totalitarian governments' ability to incorporate the existence of such technologies into their operations.”

But equally they have really struggled to control information. Sure they’ve tried and had some success but this has had more to do with the immaturity of communication technologies, not the increasing ability of governments to censor information. The general trend is towards more freedom of information and as mobile devices and broadcasting/networking equipment become more powerful this will only increase.

"John Naughton tells a wonderful story in his book, A Brief History of the Future, about when Paul Baran wanted to build a packet switching network in the 1960s. Jack Osterman, a senior executive at AT&T, the telecommunications monopolist in the US at the time, said "First, it can’t possibly work, and if it did, damned if we are going to allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves." Look at that word "allow". If the network owners control the networks, who uses them and how they get to use them then the network owners have a veto on innovation, which is the story told by Larry Lessig in the Future of Ideas”

And just look at where AT & T are now – this example demonstrates to me about a company trying to impose old world views on a new world. They just didn’t get it, so it’s not that they could allow, but that they thought they had the right because that’s what they were used to. But users just went elsewhere. This rather backs up Gilmore’s law to me, not undermines it.

"And unfortunately for those who would like content to be free the most powerful actors in the decision making process surrounding the deployment and regulation of the networks that will distribute the content are those who want it to support their profit margins.”

Sure the respective industries want to control it, but the point is they can’t anymore. This is because technologically they’ll always be beaten, and also because the online world allows new market players who will offer an alternative, often a free one. They have to adapt or die – look at photography: Kodak might have wanted to control the print process but ultimately digital cameras and Flickr meant they couldn’t.

"As Lessig says, the content industries, wielding law and technology, have fought a bitter counterrevolution against Napster, DeCSS, CPHack, My.MP3, Grokster, Eldred et al and won, at least in the courts, every time. Though millions of copyrighted works are still circulating online it is an increasingly risky business to engage in such infringement with industrial scale operations the content companies now have in place monitoring this activity and targetting [tens of thousands] of people for legal action.”

This is key to me – you could predict that they would do this. They will always seek to preserve the status quo if that is where their current business model lies. But ultimately the ability to bypass the very need for such industries will mean that all their restrictive DRM will only make them weaker because people will have better alternatives elsewhere. Once the online MP3 and iTunes becomes the main place and format people use to obtain records, the very point of a record company becomes obsolete. So whether they have restrictive DRM and savage lawyers becomes irrelevant, they will be disintermediated. It then becomes in their interest to be open, to seek alternative revenue streams, for example giving music away free but selling merchandise and promoting concerts.

"The architecture of the Internet or cyberspace is programmed in the code, the logical layer and protocols that determine how it operates …The Net - an entirely artificially created entity”

This is true, but it doesn’t mean it’s an entirely controllable or predictable entity. I heard Robert Cailliau, a colleague of Tim Berners-Lee, once argue that we were reaching the edges of our understanding of the complexity in the net. He joked that maybe it was using us to get built. Just as artificial life simulations are artificially created they can still produce patterns and activity that are entirely unpredictable, so the net is better viewed as an ecosystem than a piece of code that can be tweaked to make it do what you want.

Which brings me to Tim O'Reilly's Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution which offers six lessons for the media revolution which though outlined in the relative ancient history of 2002 still, I think, hold true today:

Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation

Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.

Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.

Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.

Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service

Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it.

The key ones in the current context being lesson 5, 6 and 7.”

Thanks for adding these in – I meant to in my post and forgot. For me, I’d say it was 1 and 5. 1 is similar to Shirky’s second law – it implies that creators would rather give content away than have it locked down and be obscure. Given the choice between fame and fortune, fame wins. And 5 is exactly right – they threaten existing publishers who will fight to stop them – but they’ll lose.

Tim O'Reilly: "The question then, is not the death of book publishing, music publishing, or film production, but rather one of who will be the publishers”

I’d agree with this and conclude that increasingly ‘we’ are the publishers and as such ‘we’ don’t have the vested interest in controlling rights, because of Shirky’s second law.

Though Adam Smith and Garrett Hardin [Tragedy of the Commons] might dispute the notion that individual participants in Web 2.0 activities, unlike Dawkin's selfish gene, would behave in the best interests of the system as a whole thereby speeding the evolutionary process)”

I knew a natural selection analogy was always a bit dangerous and open to misinterpretation, but just to clarify. The reason I say it speeds the evolutionary process is that natural selection doesn’t have sight of the overall objective, it isn’t an intelligent entity making decisions. Whereas people producing content obviously are, so you don’t have to wait for random changes to make improvements. My recourse to natural selection was to demonstrate that massive distribution can produce amazing complexity, indeed is probably the best way to get complexity. The more obvious analogy is with software production, where the top-down proprietary (read Microsoft) approach is struggling now against the distributed open source approach in producing complex, robust software.

The future of content -Pt 1

[Note - this is part of a distributed article, see previous post for explanation]

The Future of Content

In this section I am going to argue that digital content will move toward being free and widely available because of two complementary arguments: the argument from economics and the argument from quality.

The argument from economics

Where content can be digitised, it is having a profound effect on the economics that underlie the business model of that content, and the way society uses and thinks about it. In this opening section I want to look at two examples of how the digitisation of content has led to significant changes in a number of industries.

Newspapers

Many newspapers ignored the online world for too long, assuming their customers would want their news that way. Now that they have been forced to shift all of their content online, they are finding new business models to cope with this. The initial hope was that essentially the same model would apply, that people would pay for content. But the pay per copy, micropayment and subscription model have all failed. Most recently the New York Times closed its TimesSelect subscription business and made its content free. Apart from it not making enough money, the reason seems to be that the subscription model harmed the alternative model of advertising, which is driven by the global audience finding their content.

Vivian Schiller of The Times comments “What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo … our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising”. In other words, it is better to be free to all of the market than paid for by a small section.

Music

Another example of the massive changes wrought in an industry by the digitisation of content is the music industry, which like newspapers was slow, and resistant, to change. The wake-up call for the music industry was Napster, when suddenly millions of users were exchanging songs and albums without paying. This was partly a result of wanting to have something for free, but it was also because Napster facilitated behaviour which was the content discovery and the social function of music. Through Napster users could find other bands that were similar, sample different types of music, find other users with similar tastes and, most importantly, do all this from their laptop.

Eventually, iTunes saw the industry find a model that seemed to suit both parties. Users could download individual tracks at relatively low cost, and also engage in the content discovery through shared playlists.

LastFm and Pandora take this social aspect a stage further, by data mining users actions to build up a network of artists, so that you only need enter an artist’s name and be able to have a personalised radio station playing similar tracks. You can also find users with similar tastes, join groups, see upcoming events, etc. You can’t own music through these sites and you can’t request a specific album, but when the richness of the choice becomes so great, maybe that becomes less significant. And meanwhile the file sharing software is back, with applications such as Limewire allowing users to share files again.

The internet has also changed the relationship of the recording artist to the record companies. Increasingly bands are establishing an online presence, allowing free downloads of their music to build a following, touring, and recording an album, and only then seeking a label. Even this last stage will become redundant once CDs finally disappear. As Chris Anderson puts it in the Long Tail

“At this point, the artists don't need the labels any more. The consumers don't need the labels any more and I think the labels, rather than trying to protect what business they have, need to ask themselves what is their relevance."

Changing our relationship to content

I’ve concentrated just on two of the more obvious examples here, but there are many more. For instance, where audio goes, video will follow once the bandwidth is sufficient. So for traditional television broadcast we are seeing subscription models becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. This has been partly affected by the BitTorrent type sharing services that allow the download of large AV files. At the moment this remains something of a technical skill, but as it becomes more viable and easier, then DVDs will go the way of CDs.

As well as changing the underlying economics of the industry, it alters the way we relate to the original product. To return to music again, in Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger suggests that digitisation of content has altered our perceptions of what we thought was the basic unit of musical output:

"For decades we've been buying albums. We thought it was for artistic reasons, but it was really because the economics of the physical world required it: Bundling songs into long-playing albums lowered the production, marketing, and distribution costs ... As soon as music went digital, we learned that the natural unit of music is the track."

Nick Carr disagrees with Weinberger, stating the artistic structure of the album, using Exile on Main Street as an example but Clay Shirky argues that if this were so, then it would survive digitisation. When you look on iTunes this is not borne out - most people download Tumbling Dice.

Digitisation has made the track the currency, and then users have begun to create their own playlists by mixing tracks together. In addition, attendance at concerts and festivals is on the increase – people will pay for the live event, but less so for the content that supports it. Digitisation has changed our relationship to music, artists and record companies. Forever.

Shirky’s Second Law and the Content Law

In 2003 Clay Shirky wrote an article called Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content, in which he argued that micropayments (which he defined as "payments of between a quarter and a fraction of a penny,”) would fail. At the time there was considerable interest, and belief, in micropayments as a model for internet enterprise. He said of the failed attempts of micropayments that “they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response.” Whereas analogue publishing has inherent costs, essentially the cost of the format, storage and transportation, digital publishing doesn’t. The cost involved then is that of the creators, and online the creator can become the publisher. They will then be faced with a dilemma, Shirky argues, of fame or fortune. In an analogue publishing world you could have both, since in order to achieve fame lots of people need to have read your book, or bought your album. If online people are resistant to paying then charging for your content limits your fame potential. As he puts it in a follow up posting in 2007, creators are “in the position of having to decide between going for audience size (fame) or restricting and charging for access (fortune), and that the desire for fame, no longer tempered by reproduction costs, would generally win out.”

We’ll call this Shirky’s second law (the first is generally given as “Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality”, a precursor to the long tail), that is given the choice between fame and fortune, fame wins out.

This, combined with what we have seen above led me to propose the content law, which I think embodies what will happen to content in the future:

"Digital content wants to be free, and will seek the path to maximum access."

In their book Blown to Bits, Evans and Wurster argued that the digital marketplace has seen the unbundling of the economics of information and physical product. This is most readily seen in retail, where you have to see the physical object in a shop to know about it, but online the product information is separated out. David Weinberger explores the implications of this unbundling further, in that it allows infinite recategorisation because the information, unlike the physical product, can be in multiple places at once.

Let’s consider a possible future example, that of books. When the web first became popular there were some suggestions that books would disappear since we could download free ones. This did not come to pass for a number of reasons:

1. Transportability – books are easy to carry about, and don’t run out of battery life, can be used on a train and don’t require a special device.

2. Ease of use – books don’t require special help programmes, can be used by most of the population, have good navigation features and are good at presenting text, compared with the small screens of some hand held devices.

3. Cultural value – we cherish books as social artifacts. Few things cause as much outrage amongst civilised people as seeing books being burnt or desecrated. People have a deep affection towards the tactile nature of a book.

For these reasons, and combined with the advanced content discovery facilitated by Amazon and co, book sales have done very well since the arrival of the net. But let us consider what would happen if digital paper really arrived (despite several proclamations digital ink and paper have been stubbornly difficult to realise, but that isn’t the point of my argument). It felt like real paper, you could have it bound in books like real paper, you could write on it like real paper. But crucially the content it displayed could change, you could search it, and it could record all those annotations you made.

Even as something of a bibliophile, this begins to look tempting to me. I like having books as objects on my shelves, but I used to like having vinyl albums and CDs also, but now I only have MP3s (and clear shelves). If digital paper were so good it overcame the 3 benefits of books above, then it would have significant advantages over real paper.

What would the book publishing industry look like then? I would suggest that Shirky’s Second Law and the Content Law would take over. What would be the role of publishers? If you can download a copy of book into your digital paper book, then a good deal of what the publisher does disappears. They don’t need to provide the printing, binding, or distribution. What they can provide is the marketing. But this is where Shirky’s second law becomes relevant – some authors will start to give their content away cheaply (since unless you’re JK Rowling, most of the cost of a book goes to the retailer and publisher to cover all the costs associated with analogue format). As an author you may only get 10% and have to do most of the work, so why not sell it for that and generate interest online? Then another author decides that actually what they’ll do is give their book away free, because that way people link to it, quote from it, mash it up with Google map overlays, or whatever. Being free and open generates a lot more traffic.

For the industry as a whole the content law is now in operation. Books are now digital content that wants to be free and to have the maximum audience. Publishers need to find a new business model and relevance or they disappear.

As George Siemens puts it "Consumers, like learners will in the future, have a dramatically different relationship with content than they have had in the past. Textbook publishers, journals, and other content-centric industries need to take heed of these lessons and adjust before they become the next statistic.”

The argument from quality

The argument I have given above suggests that economics will be the main driving factor in the liberation of content and has focused on individuals or small groups creating content. A second factor is that it will improve the quality of a lot of content through the distribution of the process.

Here we have a powerful analogy in the process of natural selection which shows us that a vastly distributed process can produce things of great complexity. As Daniel Dennett argues in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Darwin’s great contribution was to remove the need for top down intervention (or sky hooks in his metaphor) in any explanation of how biological complexity is achieved:

"Cranes can do the lifting work our imaginary skyhooks might do, and they do it in an honest, non-question-begging fashion… Skyhooks are miraculous lifters, unsupported and insupportable. Cranes are no less excellent as lifters, and they have the decided advantage of being real.” (pg 75).

The blind, but distributed process of natural selection was sufficient to do all the ‘lifting’ required in biological design space. Natural selection is distributed over many individuals in a species and over a very long time span. This allows for small, but incremental changes to produce cumulative complexity. The internet allows for similar distribution across individuals, but unlike natural selection, each participant is not dumb, or blind, to the process, thus the overall process is speeded up considerably, and we don’t have to wait millions of years for the results.

What the internet, and web 2.0 in particular, achieves is this massive distribution of the task. Just as prior to Darwin there was no way of conceiving of biological complexity without some designer, without top-down input, so many of the web 2.0 critics fail to understand how you can achieve the relevant sophistication required for, an encyclopaedia say, without a heavily controlled, centralised, top-down process. The democratisation of process that web 2.0 has wrought is key to understanding why they are wrong.

Take photography as an example. There are a lot of people out there who are quite good photographers, some of whom are ignorant of the very specialist skills required, but who have a natural talent, others who have some knowledge, and others still who are specialist in certain types of photography. They were all largely ignorant though of the process required to become professional photographers, of how to share their photographs when the sharing is controlled by the economics of distribution and a top down authority. With the advent of Flickr all of these people can now share their photographs. The result is an explosion of creativity, and real, undeniable high quality photographs.

What the web 2.0 critics would say is that if you compare any photographer at random from Flickr with any random professional photographer then the second will win out, because they have been through the filtering process. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the distributed process that is now in place. Sure, if you pick any photographer at random on Flickr then you probably find very average family snaps, but the result of the process as a whole is the production of islands of complexity. And what is more, because the traditional filtering process in the top-down model tends to make professional opinion converge, what you get from the bottom up process is a far greater range of inventiveness and style. In evolutionary terms, the first process is like inter-breeding while the second is akin to broadening the gene pool.

This is what critics such as Andrew Keen fail to appreciate in their criticism of web 2.0 and user generated content. It is not the comparison of any one individual with another, or any one artefact, that is significant, but comparison between the processes. And when it comes to producing complexity, mass distribution wins every time.

So the second reason why content will become free is that only by removing it from behind the confines of payment and strict rights control, can certain types of content be improved. We have seen this in software of course with open source, and with general knowledge in wikipedia, but it also occurs on a smaller basis with blog posts, podcasts, etc where the overall product is improved by making it open, and then incorporating user comments and feedback.

[Over to Ray Corrigan for the second part of this]

The content law

Through the various projects I've been involved in recently (openlearn, broadcast strategy review, Flosscom), I've come to the realisation that something very significant has happened to the nature of content. It can be summarised thus:

"Digital content wants to be free, and will seek the path to maximum access."

Let's call it the content law. It can be seen as a variation on Dan Gillmore's 'the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it'. Evans and Wurster have argued that the digital marketplace has seen the unbundling of the economics of information and physical product. This is most readily seen in retail, where you have to see the physical object in a shop to know about it, but online the product information is separated out. David Weinberger explores the implications of this unbundling further, in that it allows  infinite recategorisation because the information, unlike the physical product, can be in multiple places at once.

When the product is digital (image, movie, text, audio) then both the product and it's information (and in the Weinberger sense the product is the information since everything is metadata), can be in multiple places. One of the consequences of this is that for any given digital market the ultimate outcome will be that eventually, and despite all the efforts to restrict it, digital content will be freely available.

Let's consider some examples. Firstly, photography: in an analogue world the physical photograph (or the negative) was the information and the product. If you wanted to buy a photo you would have to buy a physical copy. The numbers of these could be controlled, and thus so could the price. With digital photography the initial online offerings still attempted to sell costly images in the $100s. For the individual services like Ofoto allowed you to share photos, but only at a thumbnail, and only with limited people. They didn't want users to download the digital file, only to order prints from them. Then along comes Flickr and now we have largely free content, available to everyone.

In broadcast the changes haven't quite gone this far yet, but they will. As content moves online and companies like Sky and BT move in to each other's territory (Sky offering broadband, BT offering TV services), then the expensive subscription model of Sky begins to break down. There is too much free content out there to make it worthwhile. Large events (mainly sports) are sustaining the subscription model for a while, but eventually it will become unviable. Sky know this which is why they are branching out in to other services which people will pay for, such as broadband.

Lastly, music has been the one industry that has really struggled with this desire for content to be liberated. For years the record company ignored the internet (a case of commercial negligence), until Napster forced them to take notice. Suddenly content was free and everywhere. They fought back with legal action and restrictive DRM. The important thing for record company execs to realise is that the success of iTunes represents a step along the path to the liberation of content, not an end point. Increasingly artists are recording their own material, releasing it  online and establishing a live following. They are effectively disintermediating the record companies. Having established an audience the artist may then sign a deal with a company for some of the marketing, but this is only because we have the intermediate stage of CDs still.

There are a number of steps in all these scenarios. The process goes something like this:

1. The industry ignores the implications of digitisation and the internet
2. The industry sees the internet as a means to find a global market for doing roughly the same business model.
3. An initial outsider breaks down barriers, but the industry fights back with heavy handedness that demonstrate it wants to hold on to the original model and doesn't get it.
4. A halfway business model is found. The industry breathes a sigh of relief and execs open the champagne, because they think they have found a way to maintain their established business practice and enhance the possibilities of the net. They're wrong.
5. Through bottom up activity and newcomers to the industry content gradually becomes free and alternative business models emerge.
6. The established players finally realise the model has changed and adapt or die.

The content law may seem simple, but it has enormous implications. Let's try a thought experiment: imagine a matter transporter has been invented. The implications for transport industries, car manufacturers, holidays, property prices, retail etc would be enormous. The physical (including people) becomes digital content as it were, so there is no need to live near your place of work (or even to have a 'place of work').

The internet is a matter transporter for digital content. If you are working in any sector where the content can be digitised (broadcast, music, newspapers, movies, and er, education) then you should repeat the content law to yourself everyday, because it means you have to find alternative revenue streams for when your content achieves its nirvanic state of free and available to everyone. There may be some content which can survive this law, but you are probably going to do your organisation a bigger service if you assume the content law is true for you also and instead of trying to find ways to combat it, you seek ways to build new models around it.

Is imperfect material better for encouraging participation?

In an earlier post I mentioned that people weren't adapting openlearn material much. Similarly, the FLOSScom summer university hasn't seen as much input as we'd like (you can still input, just go there, register and edit pages). There are a number of possible reasons for this, such as the ease of modification, the cultural attitude towards reuse in the audience, the size of audience, the motivation to adapt, etc.

One additional factor that occurred to me was that maybe blank or very incomplete resources are better if you want participation. The openlearn content is very good, and has been through extensive editing and review as part of the OU process. The user may well think 'there's no point changing this, I'll take it as it is.' The Flosscom site isn't as thorough, but we did seed the content, and maybe this gives the impression there is nothing to add. This may be a phenomenon peculiar to education, in much the same way as you can have a flourishing discussion in a forum and as soon as a tutor or the course team join in with an opinion, it kills it dead, as if that represents the final word.

So maybe for educational content you need to make it imperfect, empty or activity focused. Simply giving people content and expecting them to adapt it won't happen - they'll either reuse wholesale or ignore. This could be a cultural thing, people feel uncomfortable taking someone else's content and adapting it, probably because we've been so thoroughly schooled in avoiding plagiarism - thou shalt not mess with another educator's material.

Is education intrinsically a bit dull?

This question has been bothering me lately. Like everyone and their (lol)cat I am much taken by the enthusiasm, community, user involvement and creativity found in social networking/web 2.0 sites, and look on them rather covetously for education purposes. I feel like I'm at a big dinner event and on the table next to mine everyone is laughing and having a great time, while on my table we are haveing very earnest discussions about the Iraq war. It's interesting, but after a while, you want to find an excuse to join the other table, or at least get some of them to swap on to your table.

We're in the process of a few web 2.0 initiatives at the OU, including a social networking type one. In addition we already have the excellent openlearn, which is giving away loads of great content free, and allowing people to take it and adapt it. Except they aren't. Well, not much anyway. They are looking at it, but there isn't as much reuse and adaptation happening as we'd hoped for. Now this could be because it's still fairly new, or that attitudes in higher education lag behind those in the online community so reuse is still frowned upon, or it could be something to do with our setup.

But if we are to really map any of this 2.0 stuff across to higher education, then it has to have the subtle motivational factors found in the successful sites, such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, wikipedia, etc, etc. What a lot of these sites have in common is that they offer quick gratification and feedback (as AJ suggest, it's all Skinnerian conditioning). I know that there is a lot of indepth debate and involvement in these sites e.g. the discussions around wikipedia articles, but they also offer instant returns - you can set up your Flickr site and upload some photos immediately. Then you get progressive returns, upload some more, maybe you get some comments, you find some you like, you comment, you join a community, and so on.

Education doesn't seem to work like this. I think education is one of the most rewarding activities you can undertake, but that's not the same as exciting, and excitement is what seems to drive a lot of the social sites, in that they are either exciting themselves, or they are about exciting things, eg. bands on MySpace. The key question for all us educators looking at web 2.0 for education then, is 'does it have to be this way?' Is there something in the DNA of education that means it has to be worthy, hard work, a little dull but ultimately rewarding, or could it be restructured so it has more of these quick hits and progressive involvement?

If I was a cynical man I'd say us educational technologists will spend the next 3 years not really answering this question and then move on to the next big thing. But I'm not.

FLOSScom summer school is go!

As part of the FLOSScom project I'm involved with we are running a FLOSScom Summer University. The idea is that we want to recreate some of the characteristics found in open source communities in an educational context.

Participants will create resources around FLOSS topics and then create a 'toolkit'. This is meant to be a guide for anyone who comes afterwards and wants to adapt or create a course (in any subject area) that uses FLOSS principles. Having created the resources the participants will have the experience and the knowledge to do this, we hope.

Like participation in FLOSS communities the idea is that anyone can join at any time. Participants take on the role(s) they feel comfortable with and they create the content, working towards a 'release'.

If you fancy having a look it can be found at the Ubuntu site https://wiki.ubuntu.com/flosscom Just register and take part.

You can see me talking incoherently about it here via Flashmeeting http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk/fm/3b8624-9146

OpenLearn conference

Patrick McAndrew (keep blogging Patrick!) sent me a call for papers for an open learn conference here at the OU, which might be of interest to some readers:

The call for papers is open for the openlearn 2007 conference: researching open content in education. Deadline for submission by short papers (~1000words) is 31st May 2007. The conference will be held 30-31 October 2007 near The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. There will be no charge for attendance with priority for registration given to those responding to the call for papers. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education.

The four main themes are:

• Research agenda,
• Sustainability,
• User experience,
• Software and tools

Further information can be found at: http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/openlearn2007

Forms for submission of papers can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/openlearn2007/papers.php and should be emailed to [email protected] by 31st May 2007.

Open as to...

The OU's internal curriculum and technology conference ran over the last couple of days. As with all such events it is both inspiring and a bit deflating. Inspiring because you get to hear of all the good stuff going on and see the enthusiasm of your colleagues. Deflating because things you want to happen still seem a long way off, and some of the same old arguments keep coming up.

One of the thoughts that occurred to me (not for the first time) was that the OU now needs to establish a new definition of openness, and by extension, new identity for itself. The OU's mission statement is:

open to people, places, methods and ideas

Now these are all good, I don't want to do away with any (although I sometimes might question the how much the methods one is true), but I think we could extend this to open as to technology and content. Here's why: increasingly the tools people use as part of their everyday lives are far more sophisticated than universities can create and (more significantly) maintain. We're going to have to accept that people have these tools and don't want a separate (inferior) set for learning. The walled garden approach is becoming less and less viable. Similarly, the amount and quality of content available makes the creation of bespoke content a much less useful way of spending time for an academic. But obviously we need to do something, so what we do is offer some good quality content, we construct good learning activities and we offer support and guidance (as well as all that accreditation stuff).

The other aspect of openness that struck me was that, like all unis, our VLE requires authentication to access. As soon as you do this you are cut off from the connected world. You can't use cool tools like Gabbly (unless you install a university version), and you can't subscribe to feeds. This came home to me in a workshop Tony Hirst ran, and he has a good rant on how the OU is failing to grasp the significance of RSS. Now there are a lot of reasons why a VLE needs to be closed (rights, privacy, etc), but increasingly it looks like a high price to pay.

I gave a talk on the broadcast strategy, which looked at how things have changed and suggests some new models for how broadcast could be used in teaching. Slideshare file below:

I wrote that!

Someone has taken some old content I wrote for a course called T171 - You, your computer and the Net, which is available through the openlearn site and put it in Scribd. The course was written in 1998, and at the time hugely successful with 12,000 students. So it was funny to see the old content again. It made me reflect on what it's like to have content take on a life of its own. My old, ownership reaction kicked in initially and I asked myself if I should mind. But that passed immediately, of course I don't mind, as long as readers are aware that it's old stuff and you're not responsible for updating it. Still, I wonder if it will influence the way you write material when you know it may leave home and set up on its own one day.

Not entirely sure I get the point of Scribd I must say - it takes a doc and converts it to a form of PDF that can be embedded in a page. I get the point of doing that with a Powerpoint presentation (as with Slideshare), or with video (as with YouTube), but not really with text. But maybe I'm misssing something, so happy to be enlightened.