The Ed Techie

Celebrity twitter doesn't matter

In the UK in particular, Twitter has gone mainstream over the past few weeks. This has largely been due to Jonathan Ross (@wossy) and Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) both becoming keen users and discussing it on Ross's chat show. Radio 1's Chris Moyles (@obnoxious - oh, ok @chrisdjmoyles) has also been recruiting a new wave of followers. This meant every chat show, news station, newspaper and opinion writer has been talking about Twitter.

This means we've had a raft of pieces along the lines of 'I don't know why people would want to tell everyone what they had for lunch'. Sigh. Technology seems to be the only subject area where the journalist can display their ignorance as a kind of credential: 'You can trust my opinion because I have never tried this.' I would like to see the same principle applied to film reviews: 'I haven't seen The Reader, but....'

Anyway, that's as it's always been. Personally I've never got the whole celebrity thing, so them coming on to twitter doesn't bother me. Yes, I'm not even sure I like Stephen Fry particularly. Obviously there's nothing wrong with it, although I did briefly experience that feeling familiar to a teenager who has been following an indie band and finds they suddenly become popular. Just as print can give us Proust and OK magazine, so Twitter can handle a range of communication uses.

My beef with the celebritisation (that's not a word is it?) of Twitter is twofold: Firstly, I think if you're signing up for twitter to follow celebrities, you'll miss the point of it. A conversation with a celebrity is not a normal conversation. It is unequal, and this skews the conversation. But if that's what people want from their use of it, that's fine.

My second reservation relates more to the way the news, and society in general legitimises something. It doesn't matter if hundreds of thousands of people use something and find it useful, until a celebrity uses it, and this legitimises it. There is now something for journalists to hang their report off. This is just lazy as it means they don't have to actually investigate it - they can report around the subject.

A similar effect occurs with business - any technology is seen as frivolous until some 'gurus' start telling companies how they can make money from it. And then it becomes serious.

Here's the truth: YOU legitimise technology. Celebrities and business are a side-show.

Slideshare is the best OER site?

I've been writing a paper recently (which will appear in the open access journal JIME soon), and one of the things I wanted to do was compare the traffic at educational resource sites, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare and the OU's OpenLearn with a commercial web 2.0 offering, namely Slideshare. Will Woods pointed me at statsaholic, which in turn led me to register with Compete.com. From these I got this nice graph:

We can see Slideshare is way out in front. This raises several questions:

i) Are people more likely to share stuff through something like Slideshare?

ii) Is the basic unit of sharing (the presentation) at Slideshare, something people understand more than courses and units at OER sites?

iii) Is the comparison fair? Can we consider Slideshare an OER repository of sorts?

iv) Are commercial operations just better at this than educational ones?

v) Are people 'learning' from Slideshare? If so, how does it compare with learning from OERs?

I'm not suggesting OERs are a failure and Slideshare a success, I don't see this as an eithor/or debate, and they are serving different communities. But it is interesting to consider from the OER perspective. Isn't it? Got to be some research money in this somewhere...

Social networks will make us scared of kittens

<Image the sleeping geek kitten - http://flickr.com/photos/nathonline/918128338/>

After Baroness Greenfield's analysis of how social networks are damaging the very brain stuff of teenagers, there's more bad news for social network fans with some research just in. With teenagers spending an average of 7 hours a day online, and engaging in constant social interaction with other human beings, it is highly likely that they will forget to engage with animals.

The results could be damaging for the whole of mankind. By constantly engaging with 'avatars' of people online which may resemble animals, teenagers will become separated from the reality of animals. Baron Brownose, a prominent opinion spouter, said 'we know that if someone has never seen a particular animal they will be cautious of it. What seems obvious is that teenagers who spend all their time online will find real animals either very frightening because they are unfamiliar with them, or they will expect them to behave like avatars online. We will see teenagers becoming aggressive when a dog does not reply to them.'

In just the same way that mankind became divorced from the reality of being a hunter-gatherer, which has led to global warming, so this schism will have profound implications. We know that stroking dogs helps people who are ill, so it may be that the future generation will be unable to get over illness. We also know that animals form an important part of language development - 'dog' and 'cat' or often early words for children. 'Computer', and 'Twitter' are more difficult to say and so a whole generation of children will have their language development blocked at this early stage.

But Brownose goes further 'there is an increase in allergies in society currently. We don't know if this is due to children spending less time with pets and more time online, but it sure is a coincidence. It could be that by living online instead of with pets will make mankind allergic to the modern world. It will lead to the end of the world. Even if this isn't true, a generation of children scared of kittens would be damage enough.'

Brownose reported how a park keeper he knew had seen a rapid decline in children's confidence around animals over the past few years. 'It's like they've never seen them before. I definitely think it's because they don't interact with animals enough when they're young.'

This will be no surprise to many parents who worry about the time their children spend online, and with this kind of hard, scientific evidence to back up their concerns, we will likely see more campaigns for 'more fur, less facebook.'

Technorati - grounds for divorce

	Elbow - Grounds for Divorce
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(play song while reading)

Technorati has always had it's problems, but like in any relationship, you can overlook them for a while. However, they've been adding up lately, and I think we've reached the stage of irreconcilable differences. Here are the grounds for divorce:

1. It's broken - speaking just as this user, I know it doesn't work reliably. Exhibit A) - my authority hasn't changed for 20 days and even if I ping it manually, it still says 20 days ago. Exhibit B) - there are several people who I know have linked to me that don't show up in Technorati. As it works by calculating the linked references to your blog, this renders it pretty hopeless. Exhibit C) - my authority when it was working seemed to fluctuate randomly. There was a two months period where it dropped from around 160 to the current 79.
2. It is pre-Twitter - Technorati works on references from other blogs. The problem is that a lot of the referencing has moved on to Twitter (and Friendfeed, etc) now. A lot of that quick linking people used to do in short blog posts they now do via microblogging. And Technorati isn't picking these up (is this because of the use of shortened urls, or just that it doesn't look at Twitter accounts?). It's therefore operating with only half the information.
3. It lacks granularity - there isn't even an education channel. By lumping us all in together a small, individual blog is 'competing' with output from large companies with teams of writers. Take a look at the Technorati top 100 and you'll see that they are mostly either online magazines or professional bloggers. This is fine, but it needs a layer of categorisation over it to become meaningful.
4. It measures the wrong thing - this isn't really Technorati's fault, more an issue of the blogosphere. I would like to do, or find, research that confirms this, but my hunch is that what people link to is different, or at least not necessarily the same as, what they find interesting and valuable. People often link to funny stuff, or technical tips. Some of the posts that I have gained the most links to have been short ones that say 'I found technology Y, it looks interesting.' Others might link to this and say 'I found this (via Martin)...'. But your 2000 word discussion on Wittgenstein gets less linklove. However, it may still be useful and relevant to people. This is particularly problematic for higher education where you want to promote the Wittgenstein skits and not the tech trainspotting.
5. It's subject to gaming - all too easily really. As it measures link references the best thing to do is to engage in a real ding-dong fight with someone, preferably someone with a higher authority than you. This gets good links.

Now, you could say, 'who cares?'. Tony often chastises me for mentioning Technorati as he thinks it's all about ego (before pointing out that his rating is higher than mine ;)). But my interest has always been about whether such bottom-up metrics have a place in the world of the digital scholar, and Technorati has been the exemplar for these. If we have to consign Technorati to the tech bin then the question arises: does this mean any such approach is fundamentally flawed or do we need better metrics?

Doug Clow (who is rapidly becoming a digital scholarship guru) gave a talk recently where he concluded that we can really only rely on peer review. I don't fully agree - I think as scholars peer review will be the main component when assessing a colleague's contribution (say, for promotion), but given all the rich data we have online, surely there must be some reasonably reliable use we can make of it to at least add to the mix. I think PostRank, for example, does a better job of measuring your impact, although some of the same criticisms still apply.

So, I won't give up on metrics completely, but me and Technorati - we're through.

Shiny show #3

I had an email from Kate Winslet this morning saying she would gladly swap her Oscar for a Shiny, but I had to let her down. Sorry Kate, unless The Reader is in fact a mashup tool for finding great quotes and blending them with socially constructed text, you can't have one. Yes, Oscars, schmoscars, these are the awards that really count.

This month's shinies go to:

OpenZine - let's you create your own magazine, using a simple layout tool, and you can find shared content, subscribe to other magazines, etc. I have produced the first, and yes probably last, issue of The EdTechie, which looks at PLEs. It was quite fun, and there is a certain affordance to the magazine layout - I wrote in a certain style and to a certain length. See KryKey also, the educational importance (unless you're teaching magazine layout) is in providing a socially accepted framework for students to work within. They know what magazines are like, and so no matter what your subject, they could work collaboratively to create one. It may not be grounded in deep pedagogy, but what I think this provides is both fun and an element of forced reflection, since they have to look at their topic in a different manner from the traditional essay.

aMap and Cohere - last time I mentioned DebateGraph and aMap is another mind-mapping tool. This allows you to easily create nice argument structures, starting with your position ("I think"), propositions ("because"), supporting arguments ("As") and supporting evidence ("As supported by"). You can reply to other people's aMaps, thus creating a kind of threaded forum structure in mind maps. It looks nice, but there are a few usability features, such as I found the argument structure limiting and when I responded to Matt Jukes' Superman vs Batman one, it overwrote his one and doesn't seem to credit him at all. Still, could be quite useful:

Cohere is an Open University tool, developed by KMi. Similiar to aMap it allows users to structure arguments visually. It's difficult for me to be objective in their comparison, but my feeling is that aMap is a bit easier to use initially, but Cohere allows you to go deeper. They have different functionality, so it's probably a matter of playing with them and seeing what you like best.
From an educational perspective there is a lot of potential here for collaboratively really working through arguments. Here is the same argument in Cohere:

KryKey Personal Radio - with this still quite Beta site, you can create your own personal radio station. This involves uploading songs (copyright notice is no doubt on its way), promos, adverts, news, etc. You can then invite others to be a DJ, which means they can voice over the recordings. You can see how it could be fun, like with openzine you could set students to create a radio station around their subject. It asks for rather too much info on sign up I felt, and there are a few bugs - for instance I couldn't change the order of my music, and I can't find a way to give you a direct link to my radio station, so you'll have to go there and search for EdTechie. Sadly you won't get to hear me in cheesy DJ mode.

LovelyCharts - like Gliffy, LovelyGraphs lets you easily create graphs and network diagrams. I see an increasing need for applications like this - most drawing packages offer too much functionality so creating even the simplest diagram requires you to become a graphic designer. You can share your diagram so others can add to it. Unfortunately it's a pay for service, you only get one free image, which will limit its uptake. Personally, I rarely need more than the wonderful crappy graphs for my work. Here's something I created in LovelyCharts, when I was thinking about the justifications for revolution in higher ed:

What the Digital Britain report should have said

As most UK readers will be aware we have Lord Carter's Digital Britain report available which sets out the vision for the UK economy being one that embraces all things digital (after all, jam making aside, we've nothing else left). If you're not from the UK, don't worry, if you haven't got such a strategy already, you'll no doubt be getting one soon, as all countries see the potential of a digital economy to get us out of the hole we are currently in.

The report sets out some commendable aims, such as creating a digital infrastructure, ubiquitous broadband and all that. But where it comes unstuck is in stressing the importance of protecting copyright online and threatening to crack down on file-sharing. Admittedly they were never going to say 'forget copyright, we promote a free for all', but they seem to be limiting their view of the net to one of a consumer channel. Never mind that four out of the top ten websites in the world are based around people sharing and creating content (YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Wikipedia).

Charles Leadbeater of We-Think fame has an excellent response, which I urge you to read. He sums it up when he says:

"plans to invest more in digital technologies will only pay off if they bring further disruption to economies that are already in turmoil"

And this is the key to the problem with the Digital Britain report. It is, at heart, a cowardly report. They have listened to the protectionist lobbying of the incumbent industries and sought to create a strategy that will serve their needs. Unfortunately, an internet used as a broadcast channel is a long-dead notion, so it will not serve the needs of a new economy. Their proposal to create a digital infrastructure while simultaneously enforcing more stringent copyright is rather like suggesting an investment in eco-friendly cars while listening to the petro-chemical companies and simultaneously slashing petrol prices.

Here is my alternative conclusion:

"It is obvious that success online is created by empowering users to become creators and sharers of content. We will seek to support this fundamental ethos. We appreciate that this does not directly correspond with the existing models of many media businesses and we will set out a support strategy to help these industries to migrate to new business models and working methods which embrace the possibilities of the digital age."

If you want to have your say, then Tony Hirst and Joss Winn have taken the report and chunked it down handily into paragraphs, which you can then comment on individually at WriteToReply. In other words they've done exactly what the report should be promoting, but seems a long way from understanding.

Blair, crowds and Iraq

(I'm finding some old posts I didn't get around to finishing, so hence not as current as it could be).

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Suriowecki argues that often the ‘dumb’ crowd makes smarter decisions than the informed experts. This has been taken to mean that the mob is always smart, which we know isn't true. But what is interesting to me is the reason why Suriowecki's examples work. I think it's because the crowd operates with less information, and there are times when this is actually beneficial (although usually one wants more information).

Let us take an important example in recent history - the decision to invade Iraq. In the UK there was widespread opposition to the war. While the majority still backed the war, a lot of this can be attributed to a kind of patriotic tick, the opposition was almost unprecedented. On February 15th 2003, nearly a million people marched in protest in London, the largest demonstration ever in the UK. Why were so many people opposed to it? The interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan had not met with anything like this level of opposition. It certainly wasn’t because the protestors supported Saddam Hussein. And although it is impossible to ascertain now, since those protestors will have the benefit of hindsight, my guess is that if you had asked people on the day they wouldn’t have proposed the lack of a proper plan for reconstruction as their main concern.

If we give Tony Blair and George Bush a generous interpretation and take Blair’s word that he acted in the best interest of the country, it is worth considering why the decision to go to war was made in the face of such strong unpopularity. Regardless of what you may think of the initial decision the war has proven to be a disaster from a political and humanitarian perspective, and few would argue that it wasn’t a mistake now. So on that day in February when the streets of London were packed with protestors, we might imagine Tony Blair watching the events on television and asking himself the question ‘yes, but what would they do if they had all the information I had?’ It turns out this was the wrong question to ask, and from Suriowecki’s perspective what he should have asked himself is ‘what do they know that I don’t?’

Blair had an excess of information, while the crowd, deprived of all the intelligence reports he was privy to, had been forced to see the salient features of the war, and had instinctively judged it to be 'wrong'. As I have said I don’t think many people would have articulated it as such, but the features they picked up on were: the predetermination of the invasion (ie that the US had decided to invade regardless of what the weapons investigators found); that there was no strong evidence for weapons of mass destruction (Hans Blix was being marginalised); the unseemly haste with which the invasion seemed to be progressing; and that the justification for the war seemed mixed (the moral argument for removing Hussein came later).

With these pieces of evidence the crowd had, rightly as it turns out, made the judgement that it was a bad war. But Blair was unable, or unwilling, to detect these main features amongst all the other information he possessed. Even if he acknowledged them, the presence of so much other intelligence made it difficult to correctly prioritise them. In fact they turned out to be the key elements, and were the reasons why the post-war reconstruction was so ill-judged. In short, Blair suffered from a deficit of ignorance, which enabled the crowd, lacking the vast quantity of (meaningless) intelligence to isolate the significant factors in the build up to the war.

If you accept this argument (and there are an awful lot of other political factors which may mean you don't) then it raises the interesting question - 'is a little ignorance sometimes a good thing?'.

Discuss.

The Twitter dilemma for organisations

I, like many others, have in the past voiced the opinion that Twitter needs to have groups or filters so you can selectively send messages rather than lump everyone in together. I'm not so sure now, 'lumping' is what Twitter does best, it creates a big old organic soup of social chat, half caught conversations, professional debate, links, tips, cries for help, rambling thoughts, news updates, and plain old nonsense. From this organic soup something wonderful evolves - if you are your network then your Twitter stream is the phenotype of that network.

The danger of the grouping line of development is that it goes something like this:

• Let's have groups.
• Let's put them 'inside' different containers so that people can easily differentiate them
• Let's add in some threading so we can follow conversations more easily
• Let's group them around subjects.

Sounds familiar? Yes, it's 1998 and we have reinvented bulletin boards.

But, as Twitter goes mainstream people are facing problems. Individuals such as Stephen Pope has decided to split his Twitter identity in two to allow for professional chat and smaller scale social chat.  As it mainstreams more organisations are also having ids. My colleague Stuart Brown set up the @openuniversity account some time ago, and as he explains he wasn't sure what to do with it. He used it mainly for broadcasting news (yes, we all knew when Coast would be on next), but has started to engage in conversation more recently. This has had a positive effect on the number of followers and interaction, but it gets us into tricky areas. Most universities have set up detailed systems for dealing with student queries, so the right person can answer the right question. The danger is that as more students get onto Twitter they'll start using the openuniversity account as a catch-all. Stuart's smart but he isn't going to be able to cope with queries about software set-up, assessment deadline extensions, strength of covalent bonds, obtaining financial support, missing course materials, etc.

Of course he will respond appropriately if he gets such queries, pointing people in the right direction, but a) being the full-time Open University Twitter responder isn't his job and b) this isn't the best medium. I am imagining the conversation where I say to our head of communications, 'hey let's forget expensive Customer Relations Management software, I've got this cool tool where we'll just have one id for everything. Oh, and you can only use 140 characters.'

But, here is the Twitter dilemma (or any social media) - if students are using it then having a presence is important because any avenue of conversation and support is worthwhile. So how do you manage that dialogue without having the sort of terms and conditions that seem inappropriate in an informal discussion space?

Hey, don't look at me, I don't know.

Microsoft, Apple and the Triumph of Love

<Image: There's nothing you can do that can't be done by anth - http://flickr.com/photos/anth3000/2582043116/>

Here's a question you've probably never pondered: why didn't Microsoft invent iTunes? It's not as dumb as it sounds, after all with their MSN network Microsoft had a global media platform which they were seeking to exploit as a content delivery route. And they had the financial and political clout, they could have wrapped up the music market in the way Apple have. Ask yourself this: If you had to place a bet back in 2001 on which company would have online music locked down, which one would you have bet on?

It's not like MS tried and failed, they didn't really try in this sector. But it would have been sensible for them and more importantly, why did Apple succeed so spectacularly? There are, of course, lots of reasons, but here's my short answer: Love.

Clay Shirky has talked about love with regards to software development and he's right - we underestimate it. So what's it got to do with Apple and Microsoft? The key is that people love Apple, in a way they never love Microsoft. I quite respect Microsoft (pre-Vista anyway), and have none of the idealogical angst that others hold against them, but I don't love them, and I don't know anyone who professes that. There is no Microsoft evangelist of the likes of Douglas Adams or Guy Kawasaki. There was a time when it looked as if all this affection wouldn't matter, indeed it may be a hindrance.  In the 1990s it seemed that sure, people loved Apple products, but they used Microsoft ones, in the same way people loved local shops, but went to supermarkets. It began to look as though Apple had lost the battle for good.

Without retracing all the history, Jobs comes back and Apple gets its mojo back. But this is not so much about the boss, but the type of employees an organisation attracts. The reason Apple succeeded with iTunes and the iPod is because it had attracted staff who fundamentally loved Apple products and loved well designed artefacts. Sharepoint may be a good, functional product but it's never going to attract that kind of person, and so as an organisation the 'gene pool' of innovation you have to draw on is weaker.

Maybe you think it only applies to physical objects? Not so, let's consider Google. They represent the most innovative company around at present (and given the rate of innovation possible in a digital world, maybe the most innovative company ever). Why? Sure it's because they're rich and that buys you smart people, but I'd suggest that more fundamentally it's because they attract staff who find what they are doing exciting.

In 1930 Fisher proposed a model of sexual selection that allowed for 'runaway' features - the peacock's tail exists because the preference for an average than longer tail is also inherited, and we have a positive feedback loop. Google seem to have manufactured a similar process with regards to innovation - there is a highly competitive environment where 'innovation' is the factor that is being 'selected', and they have a positive feedback loop. This is what any tech company surely seeks to realise.

The Apple and Microsoft wars are old news, so does this have any relevance now? Well, I was going to argue that (yes I know it's a dead term but you know what I mean by it) web 2.0 APIs and the general openness movement has seen something of a democratisation of this love and its expression. Because you can build on top of existing services you don't have to be an Apple engineer now to be engaged with a tool you love - Twitter and its myriad applications is an example.

But maybe the credit crisis will change all that. I'd say this though, it was having staff who genuinely loved their product that saw Apple through its dark days. In education terms, a lot of universities have that kind of affection and respect from their staff (I know the OU does certainly), but they don't always have the culture of innovation we've seen with Apple and Google, and maybe it's that combination you need.

But for now, with the global dominance of iTunes and Apple we can say that sloppy old love triumphed - that's rare, and we should cherish that.

YouTube offline - who cares?

(via AJCann) So YouTube are going to allow people to download videos. Some, eg Stanford, will be free, and others you can pay for. Viewing online, ie streaming is still free.

Isn't this a bit pointless really? I guess their model is iTunes, but I don't think people want to take their YouTube videos with them in the same way they do their music. And as I opined in a previous post, ownership ain't what it used to be - how often do I really need to access a YouTube clip but not have access? Not enough to make me want to buy anything surely? And it's not as if the trend is towards lower connectivity is it? There's nothing wrong with it, just seems a bit late in the day really.

All of which means this is a post to say 'nothing to see here'.