I recently signed up for Spotify, a music service that allows you to find, and listen to, whole tracks and albums. It's less social than LastFM, say, but more focused around the specific music you want - whereas LastFM uses the artist you like as a springboard for finding other artists, Spotify uses it just to give you that artist's music.
It brought back to me some considerations I'd had about the nature of ownership. My generation will have a distinctly different concept of ownership to that of my daughter's generation. For my generation you partly constructed your identity around what you owned - your bookshelf, record collection and DVD archive were important aspects of who you were (as anyone who has read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity will appreciate). But for the digital generation this strong link with ownership has been broken.
It took time and money to build up any of those collections. Therefore they demonstrated a commitment which was worth exhibiting. In a digital world this effort is greatly reduced, and as a result so is the emotional attachment one feels towards them. How often would people say that their book collection or record collection would be the things they would want to save from a burning house? This simply doesn't apply anymore - you can just download again (iTunes keeps a record of what you've purchased or you just download ahem, free, versions from BitTorrent).
But even more than this, the need to own anything is reduced. Imagine a service like Spotify greatly increased so you could find any artist, and with mobile devices, get access anywhere. Why do I need to own any of these tracks then? I can get them whenever I want, and isn't that the point of ownership, to have access under your control?
Obviously there are some things you still need to own (clothes, cars, phones, etc), but if so many previously coveted items move to cloud services, what will the next generation cherish? I think the answer is evident already in where they spend their time - it's in their identity. This was one of the functions of owning these items in the first place after all. For the digital generation things that cannot be easily duplicated will be important - this will be the MySpace or Facebook page they have generated over a long time, the network they have created. These represent the 'things I'd save from a fire' in an online world.
From the always useful Jane's elearning picks I came across MixedInk. It's a tool to promote collaboration to produce joint documents. Before you raise eyebrows and say 'not another one,' bear with me. It has some neat features - you are working towards a definite goal document, it has time limits to focus effort, but most intriguingly it positively wants you to take and adapt the text of other writers. As you type it finds similar phrases from other contributers, and you can add these in. Each submission can be voted on, so you can see which are the most popular/useful. And then when the document is finalised it shows which writers contributed each element.
This has collaborative assessment written all over it. You can easily imagine setting a group assignment and using MixedInk to produce it. Students can jointly create the document, and the role of each contributer is clearly visible. This is beginning to get at creating real affordances for collaboration, which are often lacking in the standard wiki. By suggesting other bits of text the tool is encouraging plagiarism, but in a good way. Using tools like this will be the way we can make assessment relevant to learners who work collaboratively in every other sphere of their lives.
I am about to try and kick of an experiment in crowdsourcing, mass contribution around understanding learning in a 2.0/participatory/digital/social world, so I've set up a quick trial with MixedInk to try and determine what the key questions are - I'll blog more about this later, but if you fancy having a play with MixedInk, here is my big education questions doc.
And here is the company's video explaining the technology:
Following on from the hugely irrelevant Shiny Show 1, I bring the next instalment, where I look at any new technologies that have crossed my path and evaluate them from an educational perspective. The usual proviso that some of these may not be that new, it's just when I get to them.
Odadeo - a social network site for dads. It is built around the concept of 'pledges', eg 'I pledge to be more patient', or 'I pledge to take my daughter to see High School bloody Musical 3'. You can then 'pip' your pledges when you do something towards them. You can share pledges and there is a 'Dadsdaq' which shows your progress. I like the way it gets you to define yourself according to various labels (you can invent your own tags), and then find others in those groupings. My concern was that it would be populated by either a) angry Fathers for Justice types or b) American dads who kept crying every ten minutes and hugging each other. But it's not, and is quite a fun place. If you're a dad, check it out. What's more interesting for me though is if you replaced pledge with 'learning pledge' you've suddenly got the makings of a good learning social network site. Shiny score - 4/5 Educational score - 2/5
PostRank - I covered this in detail in my previous post, but want to include it for a shiny award too. They get a shiny for their widget alone, see the left hand column on my blog. I think this way of measuring engagement with content is something we need to explore as educators (to help students) and under the digital scholarship banner, as a means of demonstrating the type of response and value there is to your online output. Shiny score - 3/5 Educational score - 4/5
Shelfari - a social network for book readers. It takes the bookshelf idea from Facebook a little further, so you add books from an extensive database to your 'bookshelf' (I've added a couple to mine as illustration). This can be shared with others, and you can join groups, meet authors, etc. It's well done, and books are a subject people are passionate enough about to make a network viable. Books are sufficiently rich social objects to foster community. From an educational perspective, like with Odadeo, you could see this being adapted to work around subject areas, or rather the user's bookshelf being imported into a learning environment so that they can join groups around other text books. Because you can tag books, it also adds to resource discovery for learners. Shiny score - 4/5 Educational score - 4/5
Debategraph - takes the concept mapping idea and wikifies it. It looks nice, and being able to share maps and argument structures clearly has educational potential, but I found it difficult to use. Like a lot of concept mapping tools, it has a range of terminology (for example all the different nodes and types of links), that produce a high threshold to entry. They need to simplify I think, at least on the first play, so you can quickly bash together a mind map, without needing to take a course in mind map theory first. This is in competition rather with the Open University's own Cohere. There is definitely something in this shared maps for education, you can imagine them being legitimate forms of output, or group process, but the software isn't quite there yet. Shiny score - 3/5 Educational score - 4/5
That's it for now folks, and remember - keep it shiny.
I've been playing with PostRank. They use an algorithm to analyse which posts have got the most 'engagement' from a particular RSS source. The good thing about this is that it gets over some of my reservations in previous posts about the use of metrics to measure your blog value. These are often relative to everyone else, so as with Technorati, you'll get lumped in with professional blogs. PostRank tells you about the engagement relative to your own posts. This is potentially useful, as it tells you, and more importantly, the reader which posts have generated feedback. They measure engagement not just by back links, as Technorati does, but by a range of interactions eg. by delicious links, comments and Twitter links. This gives you a much better idea of the type of interaction posts are generating. My top posts are shown in the widget over on the left.
You can then filter the results by a key word, eg Twitter will show you my posts relating to a certain micro-blogging tool, ranked through PostRank. This double layer of filtering (term plus engagement ranking), has some potential to act as course content I feel.
Let's take an example: You create an aggregated feed of many RSS sources, eg using RSSmixer I created this one of UK edubloggers. You could then get PostRank to analyse this (although there seems to be a problem with doing this at the moment, the PostRank team are looking into it). Or, you use PostRank and in Feed Details you add in each source. You then need to add a tag eg edublog and click Create New. This adds it into your Channels in PostRank. As you add each feed in, you can set it to analyse 'Great', 'Good', 'Best' or 'All'. You can then export this as an OPML file to display. Here are the 'Best' posts from some UK edublogs in Grazr:
This is all a bit fiddly though. What I want to be able to do is for me (as educator) to set up a range of channels for a course (eg UK edubloggers, global edubloggers, media blogs, library feeds, etc). The student can then use these as the basis for their course content. For example, say I ask them to discuss the Research Assessment Exercise they can filter by RAE in the UK blogs.
The point of this, over just using Google say, is that allows educators to have some input by selecting the best RSS resources, and these are then filtered. A course then becomes a sequence of activities that relies on these sources, but does not need to generate the content itself. So, any chance PostRank team that we can do this?
Camus said of Mersault in L'Etranger that he was the 'Christ we deserve'. This phrase has been used many times, usually to indicate that if a society has a problem, then the reasons can be found within the society itself, eg 'we get the Government we deserve.'
In the digital world though, maybe we can reclaim it to mean we really do get the X we deserve and want. This came to mind when Tech journalist Mike Butcher of Techcrunch, 'stole' (or kidnapped, hijacked?) the twitter id of the UK culture minister Andy Burnham. He hasn't stolen anything of course, just claimed that twitter id. He did it part in jest, and part in protest to Burnham's proposal to further regulate web content.
But it set me thinking - we should engage with @andyburnham as if he really was the culture minister we always wanted, ie one who actually understands culture (and they lump in sport as well). So here's my suggestion - follow andyburnham and send him (non-rude, reasonably sensible) suggestions as to what a culture minister should do. That way if the real Andy Burnham ever wants his id he can see what he should be doing.
Oh, and if you're interested the twitter ID tessajowell is still free, if anyone wanted to get us the Olympics we deserve.
[Update, Twitter have suspended the anyburnham account! Booooo!]
I think I was rather muddled in my last post, as all three comments interpreted it as saying 'I want to be more famous'. This wasn't my intention, so let me clarify what I meant.
Firstly, let's place my blog in its role to me as an academic. One of the joys of blogging is that there are no restrictions - blog posts can be long or short, text or multimedia, blogs can be about a subject or an individual, they can be serious or fun. If I was a research student, say, then the role of my blog would perhaps be much more as a tool of self-reflection. As a Professor of Ed Tech at a distance education university, who has a kind of new technology remit, my blog is central both to my academic output and my identity. As such I need to be a little harder on myself about it, than say, a leisure blog about films. I regard my blog as equally important as academic publications, research, teaching, university projects (actually, probably more so, but don't tell the bosses).
Therefore, as a professional it's only right to be reflective on your performance. That's what my last post was meant to be, although in a humourous fashion (okay, not that humourous I confess).
Secondly, when I mentioned technorati ratings, links, comments and number of subscribers, it wasn't because I was interested in these as an end point. Rather that, as in any professional practice, one seeks feedback. If I am teaching I want to know that a) students are learning, b) I'm doing a decent job and c) what I'm saying is interesting. The same goes for publishing an academic article - you want someone to read it and find it useful. So, as part of the reflective practice, you seek external verification that you are communicating effectively, and do not rely solely on your own judgement.
In the blogosphere therefore comments, links, technorati ratings and subscribers act as a very rough proxy that you are communicating effectively and what you are saying is interesting. They are far from perfect, but for the way I perceive my blog, they have some role.
Thirdly, it's not about fame and ego - it's about feedback and conversation. It's nice to know if what you are saying is of any interest, but much more importantly it becomes much more interesting, motivating, deeper and better informed when it becomes part of a wider conversation.
So, that's what I was getting at. My conclusion was that I was doing okay as a blogger, but I could be better. The reason I chose the example of other actors (De Niro etc) wasn't because they were more famous than Affleck, but because they had produced better work (if we ignore late De Niro and Hoffman anyway). I think it's important to take stock and seek to improve. For instance, reflection has led me to conclude that my practice of linking has slipped, usually because I'm rushing to get a post out. The reason I don't link enough is because I don't read as many blogs as I used to. So, my first resolution (blogolution?) is to read, and respond, more.
I was reflecting on this blogging lark the other day. It is something I enjoy doing, but in terms of academic return it's been hit and miss. The big hit is that it has connected with a global network of peers, who I wouldn't be able to engage with if I didn't have a blog. It's like being able to talk the same language.
The miss part is that I feel occasionally like I am shouting into the void, or typing eruditely into the void more likely. I write what I think are interesting, well crafted posts - not a link, not a comment. I write a mindless, quick review and it gets link-love. I don't get it, and maybe that doesn't matter. It is like a child - you can have all these great ideas about what you can do and how they should react, but they remain their own person, and that unpredictability is the joy.
There's a bit of fragile ego in here I suspect, when I set out I probably had in mind being an edu-blog heavyweight. I've done okay, I get a reasonable number of subscribers, my Technorati (if it wasn't so broken) authority is okay, I get a decent range of comments, etc. But I feel my blogging career hasn't quite panned out as I'd hoped. If Downes is the De Niro of edublogging, Warlick the Hoffman and Ewan McIntosh the Di Caprio, then I've gone a bit Ben Affleck: I've done okay, my output is popular enough, but you know, it's not quite what I had in mind when I was started out full of artistic dreams and lofty ambitions.
So, maybe this year is the time to push on and reclaim those ambitions. Or should I just be happy with my Affleck status? It could be worse after all, I could be the Ewan McGregor...
"After years of waiting
After years of waiting nothing came
And you realize you're looking,
Looking in the wrong place
I'm a reasonable man
Get off my case"
The results of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) were announced last week. As readers may know, I'm not keen on it, so this isn't an objective view, but I thought I'd explore the motivation behind it, and the problems with it.
I have three main objections to the RAE:
It is overly complex
It is expensive
It is fundamentally flawed
Complexity
What is the justification for the RAE? There are two main reasons put forward:
1) It allows transparent and objective allocation of research funding to universities
2) It provides UK academics with a recognised standard for their research, which is transferrable between universities.
Let's take this second argument first - I guess the idea is that academics can easily move between jobs and have their research recognised. Except, this year the results are so confusing that no-one knows what they mean, and there isn't an individual rating. So from an individual's perspective it's not much use - except maybe to say 'I work in a 4* unit', or 'I want to join a 4* unit'. But as this year's results can be interpreted in a variety of ways, that doesn't mean much anyway. For instance, my own unit is either 3rd, 9th or 24th in the UK, depending on which way you tweak the figures. That's quite some margin of interpretation.
Expense
The main justification is so that the government can easily allocate research funding. Now there is probably something in this, but the system they have produced is so complex that it defeats the object. I asked on Twitter the other day if anyone had done a return on investment analysis for the RAE. For the unit I was involved with (Education), there has been full time staff appointed to it for over a year, a number of high level staff working on it part-time, an administrative and database system created, and plus each academic has to work on their own individual submission.
When we submit bids for research grants we are required to give a full costing of time, plus there is usually 40% overheads added in, and increasingly we are asked to estimate 'opportunity costs', ie what we lose by doing this when we could have been doing something else. For the massive, distributed work of the RAE, which requires often your best researchers to help coordinate, these costs must be considerable, and yet no such return on investment is required. And that is just one unit of assessment - there are many others across the university.
Why? Because as Simon Caulkin in the Guardian puts it:
"the RAE is a potent symbol and vehicle for the bullying top-down
managerial culture that has steadily eroded both the quality of working
life and results in much of the public sector."
The RAE is an agreed con - it has value because we say it has value. A university has to participate because it would not be able to attract some funding, it wouldn't be able to get new academics if it didn't, and it needs to allow current academics to get a rating. Academics need to participate because it forms part of the agreed career and promotion profile. A few academics might be able to say no, but it's only if universities stop playing the game that threatens the system, and as money is involved, that won't happen. Added into the mix is the academic publishing
business – this exists largely because of formal assessment exercises like the
RAE. Because the RAE recognises this type of output, academics are forced to
publish through this means
But, because it's so expensive to participate in fully, any notion that it creates a level playing field is a nonsense - the better universities can afford to put the administrative effort into it, to release people from teaching to concentrate full time on preparing the narrative, and so on.
Fundamentally flawed
The RAE won’t be the RAE anymore, partly in recognition of the problems
above, but there will be some assessment exercise. These first two issues can
potentially be addressed by modifications. More damning though is that the
whole attempt to quantify research outputs and link these to funding is at its
heart, flawed. Here are the main flaws:
The experimenter effect
It is ironic, to say the least, that a research assessment exercise fails to
understand a basic of research, namely the experimenter effect. The very act of
measuring changes behaviour, and doubly so when it is linked to money.
Academics have to play the RAE game – and this inevitably means a focus away
from teaching, or even doing research that won’t directly or obviously link
into the RAE. John Naughton relates this anecdote:
“In one major academic department I know, the most creative
and original member of the department was excluded from the RAE by his
colleagues because his pathbreaking work “didn’t fit the narrative”
The categorisation error
I work in educational technology, which was grouped (or lumped
might better describe it) in with more general education. Actually there is
little in common between the two in terms of what they value, what they deem
serious outputs, what are the major research questions, etc. Educational
Technology felt very much like a poor cousin and often one had the feeling of
trying to twist your research to fit ‘their’ criteria. And this is repeated
across many domains. The point is not that they may have the categorisations
wrong, but that no categorisation can be correct. This is particularly true of
the highly innovative research, which by its very nature won’t fit into a
pre-existing category.
Measuring the unmeasurable
The RAE is very New Labour, with their almost Stalinesque
obsession with quotas and direct measurement. The problem is that research is
rarely like that. One fantastic paper is not worth two good papers. And the
more the system tries to accommodate these various factors (e.g. with factors
of esteem as it did this time), then the more convoluted and cumbersome it
becomes. And if we add in blogging, online activity, creating software, youtube
videos, etc then it becomes even more complex. How would we measure Michael
Wesch’s output? By his research publications or his YouTube views? Again, there
is talk of addressing this next time round, but it will always be chasing the
game.
And this leaves academics with an unenviable choice – do
they play the game and concentrate on RAE type outputs or do they work on
creating new forms of identity and communication, which may be more relevant
(not to say interesting), but run the risk of being ‘invisible’ to any official
view?
What alternative is there?
So maybe the RAE is inevitable. We need to allocate money to
universities for research and as soon as we do this, a complex, unsatisfying
system will always follow.
Here are my alternatives:
Don’t
allocate research money – instead make it very easy and quick to bid for.
Allocate
a set amount to all universities, based on their agreed research rank (eg from
the last RAE), and then have another set which can be ‘won’. This has the
advantage of at least allowing universities to know how much they will be
receiving, whilst still allowing them some ability to develop.
Allocate
an amount based on some very easy to measure unit – eg number of publications
drawn from a database. It’s flawed, but we all know what it is and can get on
with the rest of it easily.
Abandon
categories and allow these to flow from the actual tags writers use.
Universities ignore whatever comes next and instead promote their own research and concentrate on getting funding.
None of these solutions is perfect, but they have the virtue of being
cheaper and less pointless than the current system. After all, I’m a reasonable
man…
Whilst watching one of my favourite films last night, John Carpenter's The Thing, I took the top 250 films from IMDB and ran them through Wordle, using English translations of titles where appropriate, and setting it to ignore commonly used words. Here is the result. I'm not sure it tells you much, except that sequels will bump you up a bit, and feminists might like to note the prominence of 'man', 'men' and 'Lord' (the last one all from the Lord of the Rings) while the only female terms that arise are Princess and Bride. In truth though it shows that in the top 250 there is little commonality in titles.
I hypothesised that this would not be the case for a genre, where you would see greater use of similar terms, so not to let a half-baked hypothesis sit idle, I took the top 100 horror films from Best Horror Movies and put them through Wordle. And yes, look at the size of 'Dead'!
Which sure proves something. I think.
Alan Parker, Kenneth Branagh and assorted British film people wrote an open letter to the Times warning that piracy is undermining the creative industries. On the radio yesterday I heard the producer of Quantum of Solace stating how in the far east they don't make any money on DVD sales because everyone watches illegal copies. He bemoaned all the promotion and distribution costs they have to bear.
Sigh. They still really don't get it do they? They have one model which they keep returning to, again and again. They're supposed to be creative, so get creative about your own industry. Interestingly, they put forward the opposite argument back in the 1980s when home video first came on the scene. Then the argument was that it would detract from cinema revenue and result in the collapse of the film industry. Then they realised that they could make as much, if not more, money from video rentals and sales and now they see it as some hallowed right to retain. Just as they were slow to understand the potential for home video so they are being slow to appreciate what the online world offers. Their only response to the internet at the moment is to think of it as another distribution medium - DVD online, for the same fee.
So, if any executives want to hire me on an expensive consultancy, here is my seven stage plan for what they should do.
Accept the inevitable, don't fight it. When content becomes digital it will be freely distributed online. It's not as if they haven't had enough advance warning from the music industry about this. So don't waste your energy in trying to invent ever more restrictive DRM (which some teenager will hack the following week), or more aggressive legislation (which alienates your audience and can never be fully effective), or putting political pressure on Governments (who understand the issue even less than you do). Instead put your effort into finding a workable solution in the new landscape.
Look at some of those costs. Distribution? Packaging? They're going to disappear. Marketing? Will need to be redirected. Actors? Well, maybe they are demanding $20million per picture because they know the profits you are making. If you're making less, they'll get less. A lot of your current costs are based on your current model - the model shouldn't exist just to justify these costs.
Be the iTunes of film. Develop a super- cool, massive bandwidth, good social interaction site with a huge database.
Make downloads or streaming cheap enough that some people will pay over downloading pirates eg. $1 a film.
Use advertising. Make downloads free, but with some obligatory, can't be skipped adverts at the start.
Offer subscription service which gives extra functionality - commentaries, webcasts from the crew, sneak previews, invites to pre-screening, etc.
Make the cinema the experience - films still have the cinema as their main source of revenue. This is not a zero-sum game: A lot of people who download a film have either already seen it in the cinema, or wouldn't go and see it there anyway. Not every download is a cinema seat lost. Cinema going is still a social activity (what else would teenagers do on first dates?), and they should utilise this even more than they do currently.
