The Ed Techie

On the demise of the scheduler

In one of my favourite novels, Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up!, a TV producer gives this advice:

"Scheduling is everything. A programme stands or falls by its scheduling. Understand that, and you'll already have a march on all the other bright young candidates you'll be competing with."

This is 1969 - no producer would give such advice today. The VCR dented it a bit, but you still had to remember to record programmes. The digital, or personal video recorder, Sky+ and Tivo, were a major blow to the status of the scheduler: now recording was really easy and you could series link whole programmes. But what really did for the scheduler was the internet of course. In the UK we have the BBC's iPlayer, 4 on demand, ITV player, and so on.

All of this is relatively old news, and already we may be complacent about what a monumental shift this represents. I was struck by the force of this liberation from scheduling once again this week. I listen to the radio when I'm working, usually BBC 6music or Radio 4. But often there is a lull in the scheduling, particularly the daytime shows on 6music which have been going a bit Radio 1 of late. But look at the shows available on Radio 4 listen again. No, seriously, go and look at them. It is no exaggeration to say I get a tingle of excitement when I look through this list - where to start? And I can stop them, take a phone call, save up all of the book of the week and listen in one go, mix them in with the hilarious Adam and Joe show from 6music, and so on. Radio as a medium, it seems has flourised under the digital liberation (although, commercial radio would argue differently)

I discover shows I didn't know existed, or would not normally catch. The week starts and I genuinely look forward to catching up on four or five weekend shows. It makes you realise how much good quality content you've missed because of the tyranny of scheduling. I'm not a prime time kinda guy I realise, so the programmes that are on when I am actually watching TV or listening to the radio are exactly the programmes I don't want.

Scheduling, or rather being a consumer of scheduling, is a hard habit to break. I still ask the question 'what's on tonight?', like it's someone else's choice. For my daughter's generation this will be a ridiculous question to ask, it will more likely be 'what are we putting on tonight?'. This may be one of those generational shifts: the schedule slaves and the schedulaly liberated. I'm still coming to terms with it: We are the schedulers now.

Oh, and one thing I want is to be able to create my own page for listen again shows: so I go to the BBC and just 'add to my page' any programme I like listening/watching - I create my own BBC channel - I'm not just the scheduler now, I'm the Director General. (Anything like this on the cards, James?)

Organisations may have to live with 'Cisco fatty' moments

In case you've missed this one, there was another of those inevitable '[New technology of choice] gets person fired' stories. In this case a Cisco employee with the id theconnor tweeted

"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work"

Inevitably, someone else picks up on it. The strange thing is that it then goes viral. There is something of a pack mentality then. Helen Popkin gives a good account of the unfolding story here. She describes how:

"Before the work day ended, Web sleuths revealed "theconnor's" true identity. "Theconnor" was lampooned in a popular YouTube meme. And thanks to Google Cache, the deleted content of "theconnor’s" homepage resurfaced on CiscoFatty.com, a Web site erected to commemorate this cautionary tale."

It's not clear if this has caused the individual to lose (or not start) their job. The incident raised a few issues for me. Firstly was the sad inevitability of it - Brian Kelly asked last May when we'd hear the first such story. I think people will gradually learn how to handle these types of online conversations, and develop an appropriate online persona, but we'll have these stories for the rest of our lives (except they'll be so commonplace no-one will report them).

But how bad was theconnor's crime? Most of the response has been barely disguised schadenfreude at how could someone be so stupid. But while most of us wouldn't tweet something so obviously compromising, if we want our tweets to have any interest then you have to add in some element of the personal. Simply tweeting a corporate message isn't going to be of interest to anyone. I don't think I've tweeted anything sackable (maybe saying I didn't like presenter Neil Oliver counts?), but equally I wouldn't want a communications officer to track through all my tweets and advise me on their suitability vis a vis my professional status.

Sure, it's a bit embarrassing for Cisco, and you might want to know if someone hated their job, but realistically, how many people have said similar things in a pub to a fellow worker? At least they're hiring someone who's engaged with new media.

What would worry me more was if one of the people who took such delight in outing theconnor was on my team. What does it say about them and their values that they'd want to reveal the person's identity and attempt to get them sacked? So, if we're going to play the 'the internet can get you sacked' card, then maybe that should include unpleasant and unprofessional behaviour too, not just indiscretions?

Learning to have perspective on these type of incidents, knowing what constitutes a serious offence, and most of all understanding the medium, is going to be a big challenge for all organisations. Personally I hope theconnor is fine, and has maybe learnt a bit of a lesson, but nothing more.

[Update: The woman in question has a very reasonable and balanced post on it here (thanks to John Connell). In the end she has come out of it looking quite good I think, she seems thoughtful, reflective, non-judgmental - all the qualities you'd want in an employee (she had decided not to take the Cisco post when she did the tweet, so it hasn't 'lost' her the job). On the other hand, those who pursued her with a kind of rabid ferocity have come out of it rather tarnished. So, there's a moral in this somewhere - beware the righteous meme.]

Universities as copyright warriors

mollyali http://www.flickr.com/photos/mollyali/3101921963/>

To follow up on my last past and clarify a few points.

I wasn't arguing that universities should ignore copyright because they think they're special, or that they should advocate wholesale piracy. Rather it was that universities are in a privileged position. They can fight on behalf of the general populace.

In oppressive regimes it is often universities who form the opposition. They are the harbour for free thought and legitimate protest. It is the students and academics who fight on behalf of higher ideals. Copyright and the large organisations who seek to enforce it can be seen as the oppressive regime of the creative net. So in a digital society, the role of the university should be to take a stand against this form of tyranny.

As an academic, particularly one at the Open University, I need never worry about copyright. I am lucky - there is an excellent rights department who will negotiate on my behalf, chase up rights, manage complicated clearance, and so on. It isn't that these people the world over aren't doing a good job -  it's they're doing too good a job. They are playing the copyright game which is perpetuating control.

So here is what I'm not saying: We can break any copyright we like and say 'it's okay we're educators.' I am not suggesting universities should encourage piracy, but they should be doing everything they can to encourage new forms of expression, creativity and communication. Also I think creators should be rewarded for their work - but let's be clear, rights are owned by large companies who buy them up purely as a revenue stream. This has little to do with rewarding the artists. See my last point below on how we might legitimately reward artists while still encouraging remixing.

Here's what I am saying: Universities can take a stand at an institutional and professional level to help change the landscape. They are in a unique position to do so as they both create content and perform the social good of education. They possess both a stick and carrot.

Now individuals can take a stance but it is at the institutional level that change really happens. This is what the Cape Town Declaration was trying to achieve. Here are some actions they could take, ranging from the relatively mundane to the revolutionary:

• Promote open publishing - academics should be encouraged to work on, and publish in open journals, or open forms of publishing
• Recognise open work - the promotions and rewards criteria should explicitly reward 'open' work by academics 
• Release archive content - the Open University is different from many universities in that it has a large archive of broadcast material. It is working hard to a) digitise this and b) get rights clearance. The latter is a nightmare - any use of music, anytime a third party image or clip is used, or someone is interviewed we have to get clearance all over again, because the initial clearance didn't include open, online release. A very brave move by the OU (and even better, the BBC) would be just to release all this material and effectively put down the challenge 'we think releasing this for education is in the public interest, if rights owners want to challenge that then let's have this debate publicly'. While they may not have the same type of archive, many universities will have an archive of sorts. Releasing this content will force the copyright issue.
• Use open content as default - try and use open, freely accessible content. This will force rights owners to make their content available, otherwise it won't be seen. The suitability of content for its teaching purpose is the priority, but the starting point should be to use open content.
• Legitimise the mashup - by making remixing and the mashup a form of output that is recognised in assessment, universities will go a long way to making it a legitimate form of expression, and thus pushing the rights issue further.
• Make creative commons a default - open licences such as creative commons should be the default mode of operation for all universities in terms of academic output, and student material. There will be exceptions (eg research with a commercial or sensitive nature), but this is about changing the default settings.
• Use material we find online (eg YouTube clips) and not worry about clearance - playing the 'has every second of this clip been rights cleared, otherwise we can't use it' game undermines the value of the remix, and plays into the hands of rights owners.
• Teach and encourage attribution and reference - one of the cornerstones of academia is correct attribution. In the video below Lessing talks about extremism on both sides of the rights debate. As well as fighting against the oppression by rights, universities have a role in education on the other side. Making attribution a core skill we recognise is one way of doing this.
• Developing new models - it seems to me that we have a rather blanket response from rights owners. If we want people to respect rights at all then we have to make it easy for them. Negotiating for rights clearance with a large multinational is not going to work for an individual. But, if there was a simple 'pay to use' scheme then a lot (not all, but enough) of people would use it. For example, when I wanted to use 'Anarchy in the UK' for my edupunk video, I'm not going to track down clearance, but if there was an iTunes type rights use store, and it was a set, iTunes type price (got to be less than £1), then I'd use it. Universities could surely help in developing a responsible model such as this.

Here is Lessig, making most of these points much better at TED (via Mark Morley):

Should universities break copyright law?

[Note - I know others have expressed this, David Wiley and Lawrence Lessig I think, but couldn't find their quotes, so if anyone has them, please let me know and I'll work them in]

A few things coalesced for me today. For a start Alan Cann sent me a link to this video on Boing Boing. It's a remix of Rip! Brett Gaylor's documentary on remixing and copyright, and makes the point about the ludicrous nature of copyright very well. The essential argument is that copyright is now used to prevent creativity, not protect the creators. It is a control mechanism. The culture clashes it reveals are truly revealing (the chap in the interview with Chuck D is like some nasty Hollywood villain), and this culture clash is fundamental in how our society develops.

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Secondly, John Naughton gave a seminar on Zittrain's The Future of the Net at the Open University. I couldn't make it, but Doug live-blogged it here. The book is about how the Net could be locked down, and controlled, because this seems like a logical thing to do against the uncertainty of an unknowable, open future.

Thirdly, I've had the audio pulled from yet another of my YouTube videos, with the ominous statement "This video contains an audio track that has not been authorised by WMG. The audio has been disabled". The track was by Death Cab for Cutie and I know a few people have discovered the band because of the video - so the argument that they are protecting the artist doesn't stand up.

Fourthly, I've been involved in some course production, and the rights clearance is always a tortuous issue - even to include one of my own articles in the course.

Lastly, WriteToReply put up the latest output from the Digital Britain Report, a proposal to create a Digital Rights Agency. The proposal says some good things:

"In the old analogue and physical world a lot of the value in creative content is protected by restricting where and when it can be accessed....But that model is increasingly irrelevant online. "

But then it rather lacks the strength of its own convictions and concentrates on how we might enforce copyright, and starts throwing in heavy threats:

"we set out a narrowly drawn legislative proposal to reduce significantly unlawful P2P activity. This should be seen as complementary to a rights agency that delivers a robust self-regulatory framework, including action to prevent and reduce online piracy. This should make a real difference. However, it has to be made to work by the industry participants,...But the Government‟s objective of significantly reducing the level of online copyright infringement, and in particular unlawful P2P file-sharing (of which we set ourselves a target last year to achieve that reduction within 2 to 3 years), should not be doubted."

I read this as 'If the ISPs don't play ball we'll get really tough'. This is about control again, not about creating the environment for a digital economy where reuse and remixing is seen as the lifeblood. Perhaps most telling is the Wordle of the document:

Which has led me to consider the role of universities in all this. We are on the whole very subservient about copyright. We always go along with the rights holders, even if they want to charge exorbitant fees for content. But if we view this as one of the major struggles of modern society then shouldn't universities take the side of social justice? They should at least have a position that is more thought out than 'we do what they tell us'. It may be that they do agree with the current enforcement of copyright as a social and creative good. I'd disagree but at least they are taking a side. I would prefer to think that they take an informed role in promoting openness. This doesn't mean straightforward piracy, but rather the promotion of creativity, knowledge generation, and sharing. So, their ultimate response may be a rather nuanced one 'we support X, under these conditions, but not Y'.

But it may require them to be brave, and not be bullied by copyright lawyers, to take a moral, and social, stand on these issues. At the moment, I think most universities are still in the traditional mindset and they feel that their role is to exhibit the utmost caution in regard to copyright. But this is no longer a side issue and as reuse and copyright take centre stage, universities may need to rediscover some of their old backbone and calling for a noble cause. Make no mistake - this will be a real battle and those who want to maintain copyright as control will get vicious. Simply going along with them will have moral implications.

Why the future of journalism is interesting

Hamed Saber http://www.flickr.com/photos/hamed/512309138/>

John Naughton has an excellent post in which he reflects on some recent pieces on the future of journalism. One of these is Clay Shirky's article Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable, which if you haven't read already, I heartily recommend. Shirky has that rare ability to crystalize all the current debate and hype around a subject and get to the core of an argument (sort of the antithesis of what I do). He examines the economics of newspapers and argues this is why they are essentially rendered redundant by digital media. The point he makes is that we confuse function with form:

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable."

Andrew Keen, with his uncanny ability to miss the point, responds to Shirky's piece arguing that the 'let-it-happen' conclusion Shirky draws is not inevitable:

"how absolutely should we stand back and trust the free market to come up with a solution to the crisis of the news business? We certainly aren’t trusting this unfettered market to solve Wall Street’s financial crisis. ... So if we can agree that the news business, like healthcare and the financial sector, is too important to fail, then shouldn’t the government be taking a more active gardening/watering role in ensuring that at least one or two of today’s digital flowers fully bloom in the future?"

The difference here is that unlike some other industries that various Governments are stepping in to save, newspapers were in trouble long before the current financial crisis, and crucially, we are seeing a replacement of newspapers by natural means. There is no need to save it since it is in the process of evolving. This is not the case with the financial sector. If we are to preserve every industry that faces change because of the impact of digital technologies it will make the current intervention by Governments look like an exercise in laissez-faire economics.

John concludes:

"So here are some principles for thinking intelligently about our emerging media environment:

1. Think ecologically
2. Think long-term. What’s happening might be as profound as what happened after the emergence of print — and look how long it took for those effects to work their way through society.
3. Don’t confuse existing forms with the functions that they enable. It’s the functions that matter. Forms may be transient, the product of historical or technological circumstances."

Why is everyone so interested in the future of newspapers, you may wonder. Obviously they are significant social artifacts of our age and so their rapid change is interesting in itself. But more significantly they can be seen as a case study, or a warning from the future, about the impact of the internet on well established, often highly regarded, businesses. Unlike the music industry, which pretty much tried to close its eyes and wish the internet didn't exist, newspapers have been exploring a range of models to deal with the change. As Shirky puts it:

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several.

Most other industries haven't even worked through the range of models that newspapers have already used up. Watching what will happen next with newspapers as businesses and journalism as a practice will provide a rich source of models for others to adopt.

So, is education like newspapers minus five years or so? It's tempting to think so, and there are some parallels, but it's the differences that are significant also. Education isn't just a content industry most importantly, and has some relation to a physical institution often. But one lesson we should be examining in detail is John's third one. We shouldn't confuse education with the university system. The latter is a convenient financial and administrative method of achieving the former, but in a digital world there is something that was crucially missing previously: alternatives. That's what really killed newspapers - having alternatives.

Rewarding digital scholarship (or Here comes the spoilsport)

Rewarding Digital Scholarship

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I'm involved in a bit of work at the OU at the moment which is attempting to look at how digital/e-/online activity can be recognised in the formal promotion system.

Some quick thoughts

• It's a much more fluid environment - we know about journal articles, and apart from some new journals, nothing much changes. Online it's all change. The blogosphere is different today than it was a couple of years ago (partly because of Twitter), and so what you were measuring then may not be appropriate now. So you have to stay on top of things and not have a fixed measure of quality.
• Use of metrics, should we develop our own? - Technorati, number of subcribers, number of views, etc These can all form part of a narrative, but won't be the main element. However, is there room for developing some kind of 'Digital Scholarship' metric?
• The personal/work boundary is blurred - when you do and what you do crosses over much more with personal interests. This blog for example, is largely educational technology focused, and thus work-related. But it also features football. And zombies.
• Granularity is more varied - this relates partly to the use of metrics, for example not all blog posts are equal as you can just post a link, or you can craft a 10,000 word essay, and it's still one post. But also when dealing with new media we need to recognise that a 3 minute video can take as long to create as a 5,ooo word journal article.
• Assessing quality will be more difficult - do we know what a good educational video looks like? Well, probably but not as much as we know what a good academic article looks like.
• Online community is often less objective - much of the formal academic process has been specifically designed to be objective, to remove any hint of the personal. Yet online it is this element of the personal that adds value.

If you are interested in any of this then joinus in a discussion on digital literacies hosted by Josie Fraser on 27th March at 13.00 UK time.

I find this interface between formal/informal, digital/old school, fun/work is interesting to me, but here's my fear - by bringing this under the gaze of the formal, institutional system all the fun is stripped out of it. The very reason blogging/twittering/youtubing/podcasting is enjoyable is because it's liberating. If it becomes part of the recognised system will we find it quantised, guidelined, staff developed and assessed to the point of tedium? Then we'll have to move somewhere else. Then I will be campaigning for whatever that new activity is to be formally recognised. And so it goes. It's not too late, you can stop me now.

Celebrity as social object

<image: Flowing Systems by exper http://www.flickr.com/photos/exper/2016537402/>

Having bemoaned the influx of celebrities on to Twitter and the manner in which it warps dialogue, this post is about a more positive impact of celebrities. I've noticed that a few celebs seem to act as a focus around which conversation and dialogue  concentrates. The ex-England rugby captain Will Carling is one such. During the rugby people who follow him on twitter use his tweets as a backchannel and counterpoint to the official commentary.

I've seen a similar effect with ex-footballer, Stan Collymore, (I didn't say the celebs were nice or anything), and during Comic Relief one of the few places for discussion was at Robert Llewellyn's twitter page (ex Red Dwarf actor).

One thing to note here is that these are middling celebrities, real megastars probably have too diverse an audience. Another factor is that their twittering doesn't seem to be related to direct commercial activity (Collymore is a talk show host, so his twittering can be seen as a related activity, but not for the others, although I'm sure they're happy for any work which arises from it).

In these cases it is very much about interacting with an individual - these celebrities are not broadcasting, but engaging in conversation. They are utilising what I suppose we must refer to as their 'personal brand'. In essence, their celebrity status acts as a social object around which the rest of us congregate.

Maybe this is okay for sport, but what about in education? Perhaps a similar model would work around particular subject areas, with popular academics. For instance, I quite like Brian Greene's books on string theory, if he had a twitter account (I don't think he does), it might usefully act as a sort of Great Attractor for ongoing educational debate. If we accept the personal brand theory then, what universities (or any organisation) needs is not a corporate twitter identity but a few of these social object personalities.

Zombify it

(Warning: this post contains no educational technology benefit whatsoever).

As friends on Twitter will know, I have a bit of a zombie film obsession. Sure, I like arthouse cinema, The Double Life of Veronique and Wages of Fear are amongst my favourite films, but given the choice, I'd opt for a Romero most nights.

Anyway, the other night, rather than watch some rubbish TV, I created my top ten zombie films in a wiki. A small point - this is why TV is in trouble, because people can do this kind of thing easily, and it's much more fun.

I also commented in a tweet that there were very few films which wouldn't be improved by the introduction of zombies into the plot at some point, in my view. Don't believe me? Just think how much more interesting these films become when we zombify their tag lines:

• Sex and the City: Get carried away. And eaten.
• Bolt: A hero is unleashed, along with a deadly chemical that brings the dead back to life.
• Confessions of a shopaholic: All she ever wanted was a little credit, now she's dying for a refund
• He's just not that into you - erm, actually this doesn't need changing, just reimagine the title.

So the next time you're stuck watching a dull film (a romcom, or heaven help us, a musical) play this game: How could zombies be introduced into the plot? I guarantee that it will become much more enjoyable.

Who are the reality instructors now?

Stephen Downes has a long, thoughtful piece on the implications of the financial crisis for society, entitled 'The Monkeysphere Ideology'. It's a 'make yourself a cup of coffee, sit down and read' post, in which he raises many issues. One of which is this:

"I read this headline in the New York Times: "In tough times, the humanities must justify their worth." Not business, which caused this mess, not media, which propagated the monkeysphere ideology, not accounting, law or political science, which participated by stumbling around each other in their haste to see who could be corrupted most quickly. No - humanities. And arts."

I had a similar feeling the other day when two chaps from a commercial company were bemoaning their experience in working with higher education. They complained of some 'pencil pushing idiot sitting in an office' who blocked their decisions, and claimed they were trying to 'drag education into the 20th century, let alone the 21st.'

Now I don't know the particular details of their situation, maybe their complaints are justified. But I've come across this attitude many times. The key feature is this: the commercial world is the holder of the absolute truth. I had often asked myself why this particular truth trumps all other truths. And the answer was, I guess, money.

People from the commercial sector who believe they have some truth to reveal to the misguided people in higher education see themselves very much in the role of what Saul Bellow terms 'Reality Instructors.' The reality instructor is referenced in the marvellous Herzog, ("Moses was irresistible to a man like Simkin who loved to pity and to poke fun at the same time. He was a Reality-Instructor. Many such. I bring them out") but the character is a constant theme in Bellow's novels. It is usually manifest in a male, street-wise character who delights in teaching the main, intellectual character some truths about the 'real world'. But it's worth pointing out that the main character is aware of this, enjoys it, and that these truths are rarely as valuable and as robust as the reality-instructor believes.

The reality that the commercial world wants to reveal to higher education is that of expediency, toughness, and hard work. And rather like Bellow's characters we have been rather accepting of this. But if the financial world represented the core of these realities, and that has been shown to be very unreal, then why should higher education feel obliged to listen anymore? Indeed, have the roles reversed? Instead of universities being told how to operate in a tough financial climate, maybe businesses should be coming to them and asking 'you have managed to maintain a viable business and role in society for hundreds of years. You have adapted without completing ruining your entire system, and, ahem, throwing the world into a deep crisis. How do you do it?'

Things from Twitter I'd like in real life

I'm sure someone's done this before, but was thinking the other day about the raft of 'online interaction is killing real interaction' type angst we've been having and wondered if we should look at it the other way, ie why real life isn't as good as online. Here are a few things I wish I could transfer from Twitter to real life:

Hashtags - how many times have you found yourself half way through a conversation with someone when you realise you are in fact talking about different things. It then becomes too embarrassing to admit your mistake, and you realise some of your previous responses may now look a bit odd. Hashtags would avoid this so at the end of your opening sentence you would set out the appropriate tag eg #conversationwehadlastweekaboutgardenfurniture

Block - oh yes, we'd all like to block. In a physical environment you can only do this by removing yourself, or asking the other person to shut up, neither of which is desirable or advisable at times. So, when some bloke in the pub is voicing his opinion on, say, asylum seekers, you can simply block, and carry on with your own conversation.

Direct messages as back channel - again, there are times when you would like to communicate directly with only one other person in the group. We try and do this in face to face situations by adopting contorted facial expressions, which can be misread or just missed. How much easier it would be to have direct messages? eg 'I disagree with what my father is saying here, but if I argued we'd be here all day.'

@replies only visible to followers - this is quite a subtle feature in Twitter. If I send a reply to someone, then even if you follow me you won't see it, unless you follow that person too. This allows some filtering of interests. For example, if I follow someone because they are a Spurs fan, then we can have a discussion about a game (eg how we were robbed by Man Utd at Wembley because of an iPod). If you follow me as an OU person, then it's unlikely you will follow the Spurs chap too, so you won't be bored by this. If you are a Spurs fan you might follow both of us, and so join in. In real life there are times when you want to have a conversation which might be dull to some, but feel restricted from doing so.

140 character limit - come on, we we all know people who would benefit from this restriction.