The Ed Techie

Be a debaser

It's a boring truism that nearly every new technology is decried by certain parties (certain newspapers, self-appointed guardians of social mores, etc) as fundamentally undermining the fabric of society. From the first wave of communication and broadcast technology - radio, television, and telephones all had their dystopian critics. From my generation the social evil was the home video recorder. What havoc it would wreak, our juvenile minds rotted by video nasties, and our social skills stunted by spending all our times in front of screens. And of course come the PC and internet we've had enough scare stories about games, social networking, and hell, the internet as a whole, to leave us in no doubt that we used to have a Camelot and then naughty technology came along and rent us asunder from it.

The underlying theme to all these stories (pick any recent Twitter scare story as an example) is technology debases us. Debase = 'To reduce from a higher to a lower state or grade of worth, dignity, purity, station, etc'. The obvious flaw in this argument is that we don't measure the 'higher' state often enough to know if any 'lowering' has actually occurred. But even if this were so (say we measured a lowering of literacy rates, lower book sales or some other measure), what it never captures is the transformative effect on society - the new ways we develop for communicating, and if humans are anything they are communicators.

What this is leading to is that perceived debasement from supposed higher states is a precursor for significant change. In education we hold on to the arguments of quality and academic reliability, which although surely important, become obstacles to any change. I am reminded of the Jonathan Swift quote, which gave the title to John Kennedy Toole's excellent novel: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." 

For technology this would be rephrased something like "When significant technology appears in society, you may know it by this sign, that the guardians will call it a debaser." So, the next time someone raises an objection about your use of technology that they are concerned about quality, or standards, thank them heartily, for you will know you are on the right track.

Debasers, I salute you!

Running with the missus

<Image - Cardiff Clowns by Left-hand http://www.flickr.com/photos/left-hand/2964743595/>

As some of you may know, at the end of last year my wife was diagnosed with tongue cancer. Some fairly horrific surgery ensued (grafts of arm skin onto tongue to create a pragmatically termed 'flap', neck dissection to remove lymph glands, further graft from belly to fill the patch on the arm). I'm a queasy male, so clipping toenails has me feeling a bit uneasy, so I have no idea how she endured this.

Then a 6 week dose of radio and chemo-therapy followed. While there are surely no 'good' places to get cancer, one of the insidious elements of it being in the mouth is that as radiotherapy does its business (basically killing cells), you get to taste your own body's decay. Constantly. It would prove to be a very effective torture since there is no escaping it.

After all this though the treatment has been successful and she is now healthier and fitter than ever. Most years we run the Cardiff Half-Marathon, but not usually together, me being all competitive and wanting to improve my time. But this year she set the half-marathon as a goal to mark her recovery, and we'll be running it together. Which brings me on to the inevitably charity call - she has a just-giving page, so if any of you feel like giving, it'd be much appreciated (and no, we won't be running as clowns).

Born again

Not being one of those, you know, obsessive bloggers, every summer my blogging activity takes a dip. This summer we went to France for an extended holiday, and I barely twittered, let alone blogged, for four weeks. This happens most summers as the graph below shows of my twitter activity (from tweetstats).

Then every September I face the problem of getting started again. In this respect every year I get to be reminded how it feels to be a new blogger. When you are 'in the network' - you're reading blogs regularly, engaging with twitter, linking out to others, and blogging sufficiently to have comments and feedback then blogging itself becomes easier. What all this requires is momentum - you need to be part of the conversation/network/hive/whatever you want to call it.

It's easier if you are just starting up again though - within a week I'll be back in the swing of it, but it's much harder to get started with all this stuff. You need to build up your network to have something to react to, but you are also building on top of your own existing material. I'm not sure when it comes, but there is a (I don't want to use this term) tipping point when it stops being a graft and becomes something of second nature because you have sufficient inertia.

And in the meantime, you can always do blog posts about the struggle to blog...

A bava birthday gift

Over at bavatuesdays Jim Groom recently celebrated his 1,000th post. Stephen Downes made a comment that maybe he should do a clip show, which set me thinking. Us bloggers don't have much to give each other except links, so maybe we should honour those bloggers we admire with something more. So, below is my birthday gift for the bava, long may his insanity reign.

The Zittrain manifesto

Following on from my last post, here are some of my thoughts on Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet.

For those of you who haven't read it Zittrain sets out the argument that the key to the internet's success is what he terms 'generativity'. The PC and the internet are both largely open systems which can be built upon without recourse to the 'owners' of the system. He defines generativity as "a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences".

He argues that this generativity is under threat from two possible forms of attack:

1. An internet 9/11 - a cyber terrorist attack that has such dramatic impact, that like the attacks on 9/11 it leads to a serious crackdown on civil liberties.
2. Glacial decline - the gradual aggregation of problems such as spam, bots, viruses, etc lead people to sacrifice the freedom of a generative system for a more secure, controlled one.

Zittrain sets out the idea of the 'tethered appliance'. This is a device which regularly links back to the manufacture to receive updates. The iPhone/iPod is an obvious example. This is great for receiving updates but it has a number of downsides. Perhaps most significant of these is what Zittrain calls 'perfect enforcement'. Because of the manner in which digital enforcement works it means that companies can retrospectively enforce changes - any illegal copies can be deleted, user activity can be reported, behaviour can be curtailed.

There was a 'straight out of Zittrain' example of this last week when Amazon removed copies of Animal Farm from people's Kindles without their permission (although they did refund the money) over a dispute over ownership. Although Amazon have vowed not to do it again, I'd be surprised if this holds, since now that publishers know that it is possible, they may seek injunctions to ensure it happens whether Amazon like it or not. If you add in the legal systems misunderstanding of the digital world, plus the possibility of governmental influence and you'll soon see Zittrain's point.

Having said that there are a couple of areas where I think Zittrain overstates the coming netapocalypse.

Firstly, like many such prophecies of doom it rather assumes people are helpess before it. Having experienced the generative net people will soon feel restricted by a limited version.

Secondly, maybe the generative/non-generative net isn't a dichotomy. It could be a continuum of generativity - for example, although the iPhone has a filter for applications (Apple decide what is in or out), there is an element of generativity about the opening up of the app store to developers. There are apps that were unpredicted, (part of his definition), but it isn't unfiltered (so fails his definition).

Thirdly, people can possess both tethered and generative devices - I might be happy for my phone to be tethered, but Zittrain's argument rather suggests we only have one device. Given the cost of laptops now one could argue that the Asus running a Linux OS means that we have never been as generative as we are now. It is thus possible (indeed probable) that many people possess both types of devices, and that's still a recipe for a generative net.

Lastly, he is rather dismissive of the move to the cloud and web 2.0, as this gives control back to the owners of the systems (eg Google). While there is some truth in this, I think that as with the argument about VLEs vs PLEs, you could see distribution as its own protection. With multiple sites competing around the same service you can easily, and without cost, host in multiple places. If any site then exhibits non-generative behaviour you can switch to another one.

Having said all this, if you haven't read the book, I recommend it highly. What Zittrain sets out is a thoughtful analysis of the manner in which the the structure of the net (and the PC) have helped shape the behaviour we see, and cherish, on it. Most importantly he makes us realise that we shouldn't take this for granted - if it were being designed now to specifically achieve what it has, then business and governments would put in controls we'd never overcome. It once again makes you shake your head in wonder at what a fantastic achievement the net as we know it really is.

Reading club as course model?

As John has already mentioned, a couple of weeks ago I worked with him and Doug on a kind of online reading club experiment. This came out of some research money our Centre for Professional Development obtained for examining different ways in which higher education could support professional development.

At the OU we have an occasional book club group, where influential books are taken by an academic and in an extended session we explore these. John has done Benkler's Wealth of Networks, Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and I've done Everything is Miscellaneous. So the idea was to attempt this online, a sort of 'extended reading club' where we take difficult, and significant works, and both explain them and add to the discussion.

There were three sessions which were run in Elluminate with a small group of attendees. Because it was part of a project, they weren't open, but it strikes me this is a possible model that can combine some of a university's need to actually take fees, and also fulfill on its openness remit: The actual, live sessions are small, with fee paying students who get to interact, have support, certificate of attendance etc. The sessions are then recorded and made open to everyone. I wonder if this 'book club' model would work on a larger scale as an alternative to the conventional course?

The sessions worked well I think (I'm not evaluating them, so only going on my perspective as the presenter for one session). We had good discussions, plenty of questions and the 'students' ('readers?') went away I think with a deeper understanding of the book in question and the issues around the internet structure, privacy, security, control, etc. You could imagine augmenting the book club model with a wide range of university and other resources on these topics also, so you have the book at the hub of a range of topics which people can explore as they see fit.

I'll put some thoughts about the book in another post.

Social media learning principles

At the LAMS European conference I gave a talk in which I explored what we know about learning, and what I've deduced about social media. My conclusion was that we develop tools to represent the complexity of learning (such as LAMS), but that the social media/web 2.0 approach takes a different angle and instead of trying to represent complexity in the tool, creates simple tools and lets the network create the complexity.
The presentation is below:

Learning and social media

View more presentations from mweller.

I had 6 principles of social media which are:

1.  <embed> is the universal acid of the web – we should build around it.
2. Simple with reach trumps complex with small audience.
3. Sharing is a motivation to participation - so make it easy and rewarding to do.
4. Start simple and let others build on top
5. Providing limitations frames input (Cf twitter, 12seconds, etc)
6. Complexity resides in the network not the application

If these are true, then number 6 in particular strikes me as having profound implications for what we do as educational technologists.

The slideshare lessons

In my last couple of posts I have been thinking about sharing presentations, particularly through Slideshare, and I wanted to wrap up some thoughts about this. Slideshare has long been one of my favourite web 2.0/social media sites (I concede that slideboom and others may be as good, but it was Slideshare where I landed first). It isn’t particularly amazing in what it does, but what it does, it does well.

What intrigues me about Slideshare is that I think it is beginning to become a case study in how new media can impact upon academic practice. This is varied, and I suspect we are only at the beginning of it.

However, I find myself increasingly turning to Slideshare to illustrate points I wish to make about new technologies. I think these apply (or will apply) across many different technologies and related practices, but concentrating on one helps demonstrate the point. So, in five easy steps, here are the lessons we can learn from the Slideshare example:

1. Sharing improves your own practice – this is  a point myself and almost everyone else has made so often that even if it wasn’t true, we’d make it so. But it is true – compare the style (we're not concerned about content at the moment) of one of my early presentations on Slideshare (from about 3 years ago):

Web 2.0 workshop

View more presentations from mweller.

to this more recent one:

Blogging and academic identity

View more presentations from mweller.

Simply by seeing what others do, I have been forced to reflect on my own practice and improve it.

2. A new form of artefact is created – these aren’t just presentations, but a new type of artefact. They are presentations that need to exist in an online world. This produces a different criteria for success to purely ‘live’ presentations (although there is a good deal of overlap). A shared presentation needs to be visually arresting, particularly the first slide so people will want to view it. The slides need to be clear and not require lots of explanation. It should be something that people want to pass on, or embed. These three criteria have led to a Slideshare-type presentation style – usually one image per slide (from Flickr) with one line of clear text overlaid on top. This itself may become a style we come to dislike and deride, but my point is that it is a style that has been created by the process of sharing. This is especially true if we consider the slidecast (synchronized slides and audio), which has no real equivalent. A new type of academic output has been created, without us realizing it or intentionally setting out to establish it.

3. Presentations are social objects – by sharing good Slideshare presentations you are sharing ideas, and people will react to these. It can be in the form of comments on your blog post which features the presentation, on the Slideshare site itself, or through other social media such as twitter. The presentation is not a static file but rather the means through which you share ideas and promote discussion. It becomes a way of building and communicating with a global network. For instance Mike Ellis posted this excellent slideshare on open content and data:

Don't Think Websites, think data

View more documents from Mike Ellis.

and Tony Hirst then used the presentation to ‘introduce’ him to Brian Lamb and Scott Leslie on twitter. The presentation was the object around which this social interaction could be facilitated.

4. The audience is distributed – I made this point in the guest post I did for Marieke. Unlike a real presentation your audience is now distributed over place, but also over time. Thus a presentation may gain significant numbers as it accrues views over time. Going back to my first two ‘lessons’ this reinforces the imperative for creating engaging presentations that people will want to view. This means that ‘audience’ figures and thus impact (to reiterate the point I made in my last post) can far exceed that of a live presentation.

5. It’s a learning object/OER – for a few years some of us struggled to promote the concept of ‘learning objects’. I still believe that fundamentally their logic is irrefutable, as Stephen Downes put it:

A high quality and fully interactive piece of learning material could be produced for, say, a thousand dollars. If a thousand institutions share this one item, the cost is a dollar per institution. But if each of a thousand institutions produces a similar item, then each institution must pay a thousand dollars, or the institutions, collectively, must pay a million dollars. For one lesson. In one course.

But this principle got lost amongst isolated repositories, metadata standards, lack of motivation, rights, etc (a classic example of Scott’s talking about sharing rather than just sharing). And more recently we have had the OER movement, which has seen more success, but reuse isn’t quite what we might expect (see David Wiley’s excellent post on whether we are kidding ourselves). My feeling is that it’s still early days for OERs, but there is plenty we can learn from the Slideshare example. If we include these as OERs, then reuse looks to be in a healthy state. I posted a while back on whether Slideshare was the best OER site around, using the graph of site traffic to illustrate my point.
I’m not going to go over those arguments again, but rather what I want to emphasise here is that this is a great example of reuse and open education happening. My own slides have been taken, adapted and used by others in presentations, and integrated as resources in some courses, all without me needing to be aware of it, fill out pages of metadata, give consent or sign an agreement. I think that’s great.

Overall then, Slideshare reveals to us that simple tools based around sharing are starting to have an impact upon real academic practice.

The Keynote Equivalent?

I've been thinking a lot about recognition of digital output in formal systems, in short, can you get promotion for doing all this online stuff? One of the great things about being online is that as soon as you start to openly think these things through, people start to point you at stuff (mainly Tony). It seems a lot of people have been doing the same (and getting further than me).

For example Eric Schnell says that

The New Media Department and The University of Maine amended their promotion and tenure guidelines (all the way) back in 2007 with redefined criteria in the form of alternative recognition measures. Their documents identify nine alternatives to the standard 'article in a peer-review journal' model

He then lists the nine alternatives: Invited/edited publications; Live conferences, Citations; Download/visitor stats; Impact in online discussions; Impact in the real world; Net-native recognition metrics; and Reference letters.

I think the inclusion of download/visitor stats and net-native recognition metrics is significant here. Similarly, Geoffrey Rockwell has a wiki for a project on evaluating digital work in the humanities. The types of digital output they list as relevant are:
Online peer reviewed publication; Scholarly Electronic Editions; Specifications; Research Tools; Hypermedia/Hyperfiction; Instructional Technology/CALL; and Research blogs.
They also provide a list of questions for those evaluating such work (I'm not sure I agree with the list, it seems focused on a specific product, rather than, say overall significance to a community).

Gerry McKiernan blogs about a study which examined 39 different impact factors for science. The authors of the study (Bollen J, Van de Sompel H, Hagberg A, Chute R, 2009 A Principal Component Analysis of 39 Scientific Impact Measures. PLoS ONE 4(6)) state:

To better capture scientific impact in the digital era, a variety of new impact measures has been proposed on the basis of social network analysis and usage log data. Here we investigate how these new measures relate to each other, and how accurately and completely they express scientific impact.

After reviewing a number of impact factors, including social network measures, they conclude that:

the notion of scientific impact is a multi-dimensional construct that can not be adequately measured by any single indicator, although some measures are more suitable than others. The commonly used citation Impact Factor is not positioned at the core of this construct, but at its periphery, and should thus be used with caution.

So what we currently have is too simplistic in an online world.

Which brings me on to the idea of equivalence. I wonder if we could follow Eric Schnell's line of creating equivalents for existing, and well understood, criteria. Let's take the Keynote speech as an example. Being invited, and giving, keynotes is often listed as one of the marks of esteem if you are seeking promotion. The reasons are twofold I believe:

1. Reputation - it demonstrates that you have gained significant standing in your field to be asked regularly to give a keynote talk at a conference.
2. Impact - if you are giving the keynote then everyone at the conference hears it, and you can therefore claim a significant impact in your subject.

The important element then is not the keynote itself, but what it signifies. If we start with this basis, then we can think of online equivalents. For example, if I give a talk and then put up a slidecast of that presentation, a certain number of views might equate to impact (how many people would hear a live presentation?). If the presentation is retweeted, linked to, embedded, then this might give an indication of reputation.

I don't think we can provide simple translations (500 views + 5 embeds = 1 keynote), which means there needs to be both a case made by the individual, and an interpretation by the panel, but by focusing on the existing criteria and considering what it is they are meant to demonstrate fundamentally, we can then talk about online equivalents.

Arguments for social media engagement

In a comment on a previous post my colleague Chris Jones argued that establishing an online identity wasn't suitable for everyone:

What of the bulk of other academics interested in research and publication? They may move to open access routes for publication but will they want to spend their time in developing a public persona? I am not sure they or I will. I haven't yet developed a blog, though I follow others, including yours. I am not sure that digital scholarship covers all or even the main aspects of intellectual endeavour. Sometimes it is a lone academic quarrying away obscurely on a narrow point that makes a difference. Some of the dynamics of intellectual life require a position outside of the public gaze.

I've pulled Chris' quote out because it is worth discussing in detail I think. Chris is not someone who objects just for the sake of, or from a resistance to technology, but from a more considered standpoint. His argument is that he has a very well established, and effective, way of engaging in scholarly discourse and activity, and in order to develop the type of online identity and reputation I was suggesting he would need to give up doing something. I think it is easy for those of us who spend a significant amount of time in the online, participatory media world to think its attractions are obvious, and undeniable. But Chris raises some valid objections here that bear consideration. I think there are four responses one might make, which range in levels of evangelism.

The argument of recognition - the softest response is to say that I am not proposing that everyone should, or needs, to develop an online identity. What I am arguing is that there is a monopoly on the types of activity and outputs that are currently recognised in the scholarly system, and that we should be able to expand upon this to include the more digital scholarship work, alongside the normal work.

The argument of simplicity - this takes the proposal a touch further and says that not everyone needs to spend a great deal of time and effort in becoming a 'podstar' or blogging celebrity, but there are sufficient number of easy to use tools available such that everyone can easily create an online presence. This doesn't really require you to give up any other activity, it is a byproduct of what you do anyway. Creating a presence using Tumblr for example is a quick way to have an online identity.

The argument of benefit - in his autobiography Martin Amis asks of the humourless 'how do they raise children? How does it get done without a sense of humour?' I sometimes feel the same about social network/web 2.0/participatory media (call them what you like) and being an academic. How does it get done without using these tools every day? I can't imagine finding resources as readily without the links and filtering my network provides, or the analysis they provide, or the feedback I get from them, or the responses to help they give me. I set out a few benefits in the talk on online identity. For me this is one of the strongest arguments - it makes things better.

The argument of imperative - this is the most forceful argument, and an extension of the argument of benefit. Not only does online activity provide you with benefits as an academic, but it is fundamentally key to what you should be doing. The argument here goes something like 'how can you be relevant to students, operate as a scholar if you're not engaged with the most powerful research/communication medium ever?' I'm not sure I'd go this far, because you can use various online services effectively within your research without it necessitating establishing an online identity, but, if one thinks this social media stuff has any relevance, then I maintain that the only way to really understand it is to do it.

Have I missed any, and are any of these really compelling enough? And do they apply across all domains eg. could I argue the same for, Art History, say?