The Ed Techie

Three stages of a relationship breakup expressed in the lyrics of popular music: Part 3 Enlightenment

In My Life – The Beatles
These lyrics are so profound that they are less a meditation on love, but on life (if they can be so divided). They almost speak for themselves. Here’s the first two verses:

There are places I remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain

All these places had their moments

With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all


When we are able to say ‘I’ve loved them all’ and not seek revenge, not flinch from the embarassment, pain and emotional turmoil our former partners may give rise to, when we can do all that - then we’ve become enlightened, at least as far as our ex’s are concerned. Well, that’s the theory anyway. Don’t think because I’m writing this that I’ve followed it.

So the wheel turns, the cycle continues. Now, when revenge so occupied our minds when we thought of past lovers, now we are able to think about our lost loves with a renewed sense of wisdom and emotional balance:

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more.

This song tells us that to love afresh does not mean that you need to reject the loves of the past. An assault on them is an assault on your former self, since it was you who loved them. Rather, the love you have now sits alongside those you once loved. You are whom you have loved. But it is revitalised, nourished and in harmony with those that have come before. You are now free and able to love your current partner more, because of, not in spite of, those for whom once you wished revenge upon.




Coda
There are, alas, almost as many break ups as there are relationships, as many break-up songs as there are love songs. In songs of break up we’ve all found solace in lyrics that are angry, solemn, full of longing, bittersweet, mournful, or joyous, or even all of those at once. 

But from now I wish you only love songs.




Enlightened love songs
A Love Supreme – John Coltrane
The Air That I Breathe – Hollies

Here, There, Everywhere – The Beatles
Yellow - Coldplay
Crazy in Love - Beyoncé

Three stages of a relationship breakup expressed in the lyrics of popular music: Part 2 The hinterland

Hi, Phil Greaney here. Martin is away on holiday, so I'm taking the reins here at Ed-Techie again. Today's guestblog is in three parts and it's on songs of love, songs of hate.




Time Passes – Paul Weller

The movement from anger and resentment to sadness, uncertainty and curiosity is often subtle and imperceptible. As time passes, feelings change and we find acceptance. Paul Weller summarises this beautifully in his song ‘Time Passes’. Here’s the opening verse:

I saw you today, or at least I think it was
It's hard to say, we've both changed so much
Compelled to look, but I hid my face
It's hard to trace - these feelings

Unlike the weight of living with revenge, a brief moment is inspired by an accidental glimpse of his former partner. The idea of ‘change’ is the foundation for the balancing act between being drawn in and wanting to hide. Alongside this sense of change and tension is the difficulty in remembering the feelings one has now and one had then. Being in love is a confusing business and it’s no less difficult being out of love. When in the next verse he sings:

I wanted to say, so many things
But my mouth went dry - and one word and I'd cry.

We know that this sudden and unexpected burst into his emotional world is painful. He still cares, but not in quite the same way as he did. He lives in an emotional hinterland, populated by ghosts of what once was and what might have been. He needs to listen to The Beatles, sooner rather than later, as you’ll see.

Love songs of the hinterland
Jealous Guy – Roxy Music
Back to Black – Amy Winehouse
The Long and Winding Road – The Beatles
New Slang – The Shins

Uncertain Smile – The The

Three stages of a relationship breakup expressed in the lyrics of popular music: Part 1 Anger and revenge

Hi, Phil Greaney here. Martin is away on holiday, so I'm taking the reins here at Ed-Techie again. Today's guestblog is in three parts and it's on songs of love, songs of hate. You can find my blog here.

Living Well is the Best Revenge – REM
Imagine the scene: a former couple meet, only weeks after their break up. Unable to avoid one another, they embark upon a barely amicable ‘update’. One says to the other through gritted teeth: ‘Me? What am I doing now? Oh – I’ve become a children’s doctor. I got the job after chatting to Ben Goldacre during a holiday in the Carribean. Of course, that is, when I get time. Marathon running/paragliding/deep sea diving [delete as appropriate] keeps the diary busy. Anyway, ciao!’

They may well have been listening to REM’s single ‘Living Well is the Best Revenge’. As a fan of REM I’d wish they thought of this phrase themselves. But they didn’t. It was George Herbert, a Welsh poet who died in 1633 who first coined the phrase. Here it is in the REM song:

Well I'm not one to sit and spin

'Cause living well's the best revenge


Baby, I am calling you on that


I think it reflects that sense of anger and frustration that accompanies being spurned, the time when we say to our (now long gone) partner: what do I care if you left me at the altar? Look at me now and the life I am living!

But the rub is that if we still seek revenge, then we’re probably still in love. We still care enough to want the intimate details of our daily life to mean something to someone else, even in their absence, where they will never know. There’s no shame in that, but it’s not the ideal condition when our love has bolted. Instead, the idea is to aspire to a kind of gently happy Zen-like harmony, where mere mention of our ex doesn’t make our stomachs churn and blood run to our faces, but instead is just like the postman pushing a postcard through the door.

To be fair to REM (and Herbert), the lyric has probably nothing to do with romantic love. For both, it seems, it is more aligned to a political stance of defiance and individual happiness in the face of disastrous government or the pernicious effects of the media. 

So, I guess this says quite a lot about me in that case. (I should add I'm happily married.)

I'm including a handful of songs relevant to each post - feel free to add your own.

Angry love songs
Survivor – Destiny’s Child
You Oughtta Know – Alanis Morissette
You’re so Vain – Carly Simon
Smile – Lily Allen
Grounds for Divorce – Elbow

Foxed by the blog

Foxed by the blog

Martin is on holiday, so he has kindly asked me to write for his blog. An honour, no doubt and one I’m happy to oblige. But it’s also a duty for which I cannot help feeling ambivalent. Why? Because I feel an enormous weight on my shoulders: I had better write something good. And I’d better write it now - it’s late and dark; and beside the words you read now, the screen is emphatically empty.

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:*
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

In his email, Martin told me I could write about ‘anything’. Despite its deceptively curt appearance, in ‘anything’ there are a lot of ‘things’. I know – I’ll do what all personal bloggers do when they first write a blog post: I’ll write about blogging.

Perhaps I could do something clever, some self-referential Calvino-esque trickery where I break through the fourth wall and ask: are you, dear reader, sitting comfortably before you embark upon reading this blog post? Is the television off; the children in bed; the doors fastened securely? Are you ensconced in your favourite chair, a glass of something on the table beside you, the black night kept at bay behind the window?

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

After all, some personal blogs (as opposed to commercial ones, say, written by teams like Engadget) seem to unashamedly emphasise their candour and seek to address the reader directly on level terms. Perhaps it’s to do with its origins: the blog (as you know) was often a kind of diary in an early incarnation, written with a suitably confessional, intimate tone. Writers used the first person perspective ‘I’ and reflected upon the more or less banal, confessional, sublime or profound, as they do now. As the function and purpose of blogs expanded, the perspective didn’t. Bloggers still used ‘I’ and often retained an element of self-awareness and introspection, even if they tackled current affairs, technology, environmental issues – or educational technology. Their thought process and reflection was and is an integral part of the blog. Blogging is to the Pompidou Centre what (some) literary fiction is to the Louvre: blogging puts all its workings, scribbles, thoughts and creativity on the outside for all to see, while fiction hides it under a huge and often impressive facade. No wonder writing about writing, setting out one’s blogging stall as it were, is often the first post a blogger writes. It sets the terms in which the blog should be read. But hold on. There’s a problem. I’ve stopped dead in my tracks.

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

The problem is, I’ve been incomplete. The meaning and effect of a blog is not just a product of the article, but also a product of the readers’ comments that accompany it. When we think of the blog like this, we find it’s a kind of concrete realisation of what literary theorist Roland Barthes’ would call a ‘writerly’ text. By this he meant that the text allows for the reader to participate in the creation of meaning by providing an opportunity for the reader to get involved with making meaning. Readers do this by actively engaging with the writing, getting under its skin, providing answers to the many questions these kinds of text raise (this is opposed to ‘readerly’ texts in which the reader occupies a more passive position). An often-used example is where books end with a cliffhanger that offers no solution: the reader must ‘write’ their own ending. For Barthes, that opportunity came about in complex texts that do not tell you everything. For blogging it comes about from the opportunity to re-write the post’s meaning or import in the comments. When we write comments on blogs we literally contributing to its meanings (some would say this discussion is the most important part of the blog). Blogs (and other collaborative documents, like wikis) are, in this sense, fundamentally writerly texts. I can sense something outside – what is it?

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

My mind is racing, thinking about writing and then writing what I’m thinking. What I mean is - when readers add comments, the notion of a fixed identity of the blog author is complicated, undermined even. The author stops being the sole provider of both the content (the blog post) and the terms in which it is read (that bit bloggers write to explain why they’re blogging). In other words, the blogger is no longer the only source of meaning in a blog.

Like the notion of a writerly text before it, this represents a concrete (albeit transformed) example of a theory made by Barthes. In this case, famously called the death of the author (oldish now, but still worth reading) the reader derives meaning from a variety of sources, of which the intention of the author is only one. Rather, we bring such things as our worldly experience, knowledge of how texts work, our education, our beliefs, and so when making sense of a text. When we invent meaning for ourselves the author can no longer tell us what the text means: once published, it is out there for all to interpret (in our case, what we know as the ‘blogosphere’) and no longer owned by the author (the latter idea a neat reflection of the current debate on copyright; but that’s another story). Barthes expressed the dissipation of the author of sole arbiter of meaning in the memorable image that the author has died. Similarly, the author of the blog post ‘dies’ when readers re-negotiate, re-interpret and literally re-write the meanings and values of the blog post in their comments. The blogger dies twice. Hold on - something is stirring...

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about it’s own business

So – reflecting, creating; writing; thinking about writing; thinking as we’re writing – these are all being changed by blogging. Some day soon, theorists of interpretation will need to expand their horizons to include an analysis on how the meanings of texts, now including blogs and other collaborative documents, are created.

But until then - I’m spent. I have no idea what I’m going to write for this guestblog. No – this whole business is proving too difficult. I’m going to tell Martin I can’t do it. That is, unless…

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

*'The Thought Fox' by Ted Hughes. From New Selected Poems.

Guest blogger

I'm on holiday soon, so I thought I'd try an experiment and hand over my blog to someone else while I'm away. That (un)lucky person is Phil Greaney. I've never had a guest blogger before, and not sure it will work, not because of Phil, but because a blog is tied to the individual (and if you want a little bit of vomit to come up, your 'personal brand'). But it'll also be fun to see another voice on here and if that makes me reflect on the nature of the blog itself. This is the fun of being a blogger - you can try this stuff without too much risk.

Of course, I know what will happen, I'll come back and everyone will be saying 'where's that nice young Phil chap gone? He was so much more interesting'. So over to you Phil, good luck!

OU Conference - talks as separate files

Karen Cropper and Paul Harris here in IET have done sterling work in chopping up all the Elluminate sessions from the OU Conference, so you can now access each talk separately. The start and finish of each one isn't very smooth since they are taken from the larger stream, but once you get started it works well. They are all available on the OU Podcast site.

They seem to be separate files at the moment, so not embeddable, but we'll try and get around to that, but they are downloadable, so you can put them on your iPod (other devices are available) and listen whenever. Here is Jimmy Wales' talk (which I've put up in Blip.Tv), it is a bit messy at the start since we had trouble uploading his slides, so don't worry about the slides flicking around for a while. He gives a great, informal and entertaining talk:

For the last time - open access is not like stealing bread

The Times Higher ran a piece on ceviche cooking edupunk Brian Lamb's keynote at the recent JISC OER event in London. Brian makes his usual good points, but it was some of the comments that were revealing.

In particular, one that states "We should also have 'open access' at Tesco: I should just be able to take from their shelves what I want without paying."

I've heard this a lot in various guises over the years. I can't believe I'm still hearing it. I know that you know this is a dumb argument, but please, can we just put it to bed once and for all.

Open access is not like stealing bread from Tesco for two VERY SIMPLE reasons:

i) If I take a loaf bread from Tesco then it is no longer there. If I read an online article it is still there for everyone else. We knew this back in 1998 when we talked about non-rivalrous goods. Can we stop using this misguided analogy now? Pleeeease?

>ii) You could make the argument that each download of pirated music equals a sale lost (although that is a flawed argument I think). So maybe the argument has some validity for products you want to sell (big maybe for me). But for journal articles it really has no validity - the whole point of research publications is that you want as many people to read it as possible. And we know that open access journals get more citations than closed ones. So closed access defeats the very objective you are trying to realise. 

Let's put this one behind us now shall we? It's not as if digital content is new now is it?

Succession and the art of stretching a metaphor

As Scott has blogged, he came to visit us in Cardiff recently, while staying at the OU for a month on a fellowship. We had a lot of great chats, and while I failed to convince him of the ways of atheist, reductionist rationalism, I did manage to convert him to my succession metaphor for technology adoption.

I used this in my VLE book a while back, and it goes something like this (from the book):

When there is a new environment, for example barren rock, a few pioneer species, such as lichens begin to grow. The acid from these decomposes some rock particles, and their own death creates a coarse soil. This is suitable for mosses, which require little soil, and in turn these decompose to enrich and deepen the soil, until it is suitable for some grasses to grow. The process ends with the establishment of a stable, climax community.

In elearning terms, VLEs, and in particular commercial VLEs have acted as the pioneer species, moving in to the new environment and creating slight changes which make the habitat suitable for secondary colonizers. These might be seen as open source VLEs, or closely integrated systems such as portals and eportfolios. The kind of environmental changes wrought by VLEs include general acceptance of the elearning approach, integration with administrative systems, staff development, recruitment of enthusiasts, changes in assessment practice, acknowledgement of tools already used by students, and so on. Once these systems have been established, then the environment would be more receptive to systems that require more radical changes in practice, such as CMSs and PLEs.

The corollary of this metaphor is that there is a 'natural' progression. Now I think we should always treat nature metaphors with a bit of caution, but if one accepts that existing technologies change their environment, then this new environment becomes one in which new technologies can flourish. It may take time though - as with plant succession you can only jump from the barren environment to the climax community by a lot of intervention, for example bringing in lots of soil and species.

But I hadn't really taken the metaphor beyond this initial comparison, but in my conversation with Scott we began to explore it further. In particular, what are the conditions that prevent succession? It doesn't always occur in nature - for instance on a beach a big storm will wipe away some of the colonizing plants. If the barren environment is your patio for example, then human intervention by way of deweeding, will prevent the environmental changes required.

In terms of learning technology, what is the equivalent of the avid gardener, killing any weeds, grasses or mosses that threaten to grow on their patio? Because if we think that there may be a natural progression through technologies, then identifying these barriers helps the process continue. 

One such barrier might be the investment people and institutions have put into the existing system. This is like the succession getting to a certain level, and then the gardener maintaining it at precisely that state. When institutions deploy a VLE there is a good deal of investment in other systems which communicate with it, in staff development, and expertise. There are also people whose professional identity becomes allied to that system - they become the 'Blackboard guy' or whatever. There is thus a combination of personal and institutional forces which are acting to stop succession going further. In our analogy this is like we've trained a group of volunteers to do all the deweeding and clearing of an area, so to allow succession to happen would mean upsetting a lot of people.

A second, more insidious barrier is that of commercial interests. If succession is about the gradual replacement of one environment with another, then those with a commercial interest a particular environment will seek to maintain that. In our analogy it's like the council have signed a contract with the purveyors of weed killer - they don't want the succession model to flourish. In learning technology this can be achieved through software patents, vendor lock-in, long term contracts, and the general promotion of a 'we solve your problems' attitude.

A third barrier might be the emotional attachment people have to software. I commented once before that although we justify software choices in terms of rational decision making around features, it is often an emotional, irrational preference, much like supporting a particular football team. Like with football teams we can only be monoamorous with software. The problem here is that we often don't appreciate we are arguing from this emotional attachment stance and cloak it in other languages - around integration, access or features. In the analogy then this is like the enthusiast who wants to maintain the environment at a certain state (maybe there are some wild flowers they are particularly fond of) and so don't want to let it alter.

There may be more, but I think tugging at the seams of the metaphor as it were, has helped me think about these issues. My new motto: Let's stretch this metaphor till it snaps.

Everyday amazingness

Alan Levine is asking for a new round of his Amazing Tales of Openness. I didn't contribute last time, partly because I didn't think I had any amazing tales (and partly because I'm lazy). But pondering it this time, I thought of the presentation I had given recently on Academic Output as Collateral Damage, three key elements of which had arisen as a direct result of openness. For example, the Big OER and Little OER label I use came from Michelle Hoyle who did a post reflecting on a slidecast I had put up, and then when I commented over on her blog she used the phrase in the ongoing discussion. If I hadn't posted the initial talk, or Michelle hadn't openly commented on, then I wouldn't have picked up that phrase.

Even then I didn't think these were amazing, but it struck me that it is that they seem commonplace now which is in itself amazing, that these acts of sharing and developing ideas are an everyday occurrence is the thing we should acknowledge.

So here's my short vid, I'm sure Alan would like your everyday amazing tales too.

OU conference - evaluation

Following on from the previous two posts looking at the OU conference, this final one in the trilogy looks at some evaluation. I am particularly indebted to Karen Cropper, Rebecca Ferguson and Juliette Culver for doing much of the analysis for this post.

Evaluation took four main forms:

1. A questionnaire of attendees in surveymonkey
2. Statistics from cloudworks
3. Analysis of twitter users adopting the #OUConf10 hashtag
4. Analysis of the elluminate sessions

Questionnaire

There were 102 responses to the questionnaire. Below are some charts representing salient issues:

 

Most attendees were central staff, but there was a significant audience that had no connection to the OU, and a mix across other categories.

 

Attendance was split evenly across most sessions.

 

Most people would not have attended had it been face to face.

 

People usually combined it with an element of work.

 

The content, technology and organisation were all rated good to excellent, with discussion a bit below these.

 

In general participants thought that the conference allowed a community to form, and thought that the open nature of the conference worked well. Opinion was divided as to whether interaction was less than with a face to face conference.

 

There was strong agreement that they would attend another online conference.

We asked attendees to give us three words to describe the conference and the resultant word cloud is below:

 

Some issues raised by participants included:

• Separating out time to attend an online conference
• Perception an online conference is ‘techie’
• Possibly having shorter events but spread out over more time
• Allowing more open sessions and not just presentation

Some representative quotes from respondees are:

• "liked the accessibility factor - it saved a lot of money having to travel to Milton Keynes”
• "The moderators were excellent; very engaging, kept things going well, did a sterling job. The discussions in the text box during sessions was very good indeed. Generally the speakers and the topics covered were of great interest and engaging.”
• “This was an exceptional way to involve people outside the University and particuarly useful for CPD for those who can't afford to travel or whose institutions won't pay for them to go to conferences. A real credit to the OU's open learning ethos.”
• “thanks for the opportunity to take part. Not being part of the OU myself I welcomed the 'open invitation' and got loads out of it. Am already spreading the word!"
• “Most conferences should be presented like this in future. As well as Elluminate the various social network backchannels can be used for even more interaction”
• “Just wanted to thank all concerned for their hard work and the effort they put in to make this such a rewarding experience. I've developed some very important new contacts from the conference. I interacted much more than I would at a face-to-face conference.”
• “Excellent - from this distance I made better contact than I ever have at a conference before.”
• “It worked! - That's quite exciting! - To know that you can participate without too much stress is a big achievement for me - it takes some of the "fear factor" away”

Cloudworks Statistics

The following data was taken from the cloudworks site and are for the conference ‘cloudscape’ which is comprised of different elements, or ‘clouds’.

• No. clouds - 46
• No. comments - 168
• No. embeds - 59
• No. link - 80
• No. views of cloudscape - 2352
• No. registered users viewing - 392
• No. guests - 2852

Twitter analysis

The conference used the #OUConf10 hashtag, so anyone tweeting with this would have their tweet stored in an archive (using TwapperKeeper).

• No. twitterers using hashtag - 141
• No. tweets using hashtag - 766
• Av. no tweets per user - 5.43
• No. followers added over conference - 150

Elluminate analysis

The following data was gathered from analysing the elluminate sessions over the two days. Overall 287 people participated in at least one session.

The number of people who participated in each session are given below.

• Session 1 - 202
• Session 2 - 141
• Session 3 - 108
• Session 4 - 97

Conclusion

Overall the technology worked well, and most participants found the conference a useful and interesting experience. The number of participants was in line (if not a bit higher) than previous year's face to face conference, but the costs were considerably lower. In terms of benefit from the conference most participants gained as much, if not more, from this form.

A few small points it would be interesting to explore:

• I would like to perform more detailed analysis of the discussions in cloudworks, elluminate and twitter, but haven't had time yet.
• Some people commented that they felt more at liberty to ask questions in text chat than they do in a face to face conference.
• The cost and green comparison with previous face to face versions of the conference.