The Ed Techie

Wealth of Networks session

On Friday John Naughton ran an interesting session around Benkler's Wealth of Networks. It was particularly welcome as I feel rather guilty that I've never actually finished Benkler's magnum opus.

John first set the context for the book, talking about the semiotics of the title and borrowed Castell's term about informed bewilderment to describe our current state when we look at the changes around us. That is, we have no shortage of data about what's happening, but we are still unsure as to what it all means. Benkler's book can be seen as an attempt to cast a scholarly light on this state of bewilderment.

Part of the reason for this bewilderment is that our analytical tools are not as useful as they once were (which is not to say they are completely useless). As John put it economics can be categorised as the analysis of scarcity, whereas what we have in a digital world is abundance. The scarce resource now is attention, and here the competition is now greatly increased from the days of TV dominance.

John also talked about the 'convergence fantasies' of many industries which always boil down to 'converge on to my device'. He argued that convergence happened long ago - onto the net.

He summarised Benkler's book as having six main arguments:

• Until recently we had a highly industrialised info economy
• This marginalised non market cultural production (“social production”)
• ICT has reduced the cost of production and publication
• Greatly enhanced power and potential of social production
• This has major implications for economic, social cultural and political life
• There will be a struggle between old world and new world.

We then went on to discuss three issues:

1. How plausible is Benkler's analysis?
2. What might it mean for education (and the OU)?
3. What might it mean for society?

In terms of 1) I made the point that to an extent it was empirically true - that in open source communities, wikipedia, flickr, etc social production was already a major economic force. So even though critics (Carr, Gorman, Keen et al) may argue against it, the best response is 'yes but look at the facts'. I was reminded of Clay Shirky's memorable phrase regarding AT & T programmers when they first saw open source support in action:

"They didn't care that they'd seen it work in practice, because they already knew it couldn't work in theory."

John set up a wiki for the session which has further references. 

LAMS presentation as slidecast

The world's least engaging voice returns with another slidecast. This is the presentation I gave to the LAMS conference (via Skype). It looks at the differences between web 2.0 and higher ed and how learning design can help bridge the gap. I've covered this in previous posts, but just in case you want the semi-live version.

| View | Upload your own

I'm an Edublog finalist!

I have been nominated (after dropping some hints) in the Edublog awards and am a finalist in the Ed Tech Support category (not sure that's where I fit, but not going to argue). It's difficult to relate how chuffed I am about this! I'm pleased to see Tony is also nominated. Anyway, it looks like Mobile Technology in TAFE is running away with it, so purely in the interest of making a competition of it, if you fancy swinging by and casting a vote for me, that'd be great.

Many thanks to those who nominated me - I now get to have a cool badge for my site:

Gordon Brown is the Steve McLaren of politics

I don't 'do politics' in this blog usually, but really, the analogy is too good to pass up. Look at the similarities:

• Both were second in commands
• Both took over from someone who had been in post for a long time.
• Both of their predecessors left on a wave of unpopularity
• Both enjoyed brief periods of (unexpected) success.
• Both then made a series of strategic errors

I think the foot and mouth outbreak was Gordon's draw with Macedonia, the election that never was his away defeat to Croatia, and this week's armed forces attack his away defeat to Russia. If the analogy is to be played out in full, that means by my reckoning he only has a catastrophic home defeat to Croatia left before they start looking for a successor. Wonder what it could be?

Filesharing and the attrition of centralised systems

I'm a dog with a bone now...

Following on from my previous post about the annoyance of mailbox size limits, this post from Judy O'Connell caught my eye - Fileurls just lets you upload and share files for up to 9 days, which can be password protected. So if anyone is planning on sending me an email with an attachment, can they just use this instead please (or Google docs is fine too)?

Which got me thinking - in our recent debate around loosely coupled systems one of the arguments against them was that educators wouldn't want to do it. But I think the way it happens is that we still have the centralised systems, but their boundaries become blurred. For example, we still use email, but increasingly we use tools like the ones above, which are outside university systems, to actually share files. Then we use Skype for chats or small tutorials. Then one educator sets up just a placeholder in the VLE which says 'Go to this wikispace for the course' or 'the course will be delivered through my blog'. There is thus a process of attrition around the institution's systems which after a while makes them untenable, or largely irrelevant.

What Mailbox limits reveal

Grainne posted recently about the frustration of continually getting the 'Your mailbox is over its size limit' in our OU email accounts. I can't tell you how annoying this - sometimes I am just trying to send a quick response to someone before I have to dash out of the door, but it won't let me because I have to find and delete any attachment over 2K to free up space. Grrrr.

This isn't OU bashing, I've heard the same from people at other universities and also people not in higher education (I know, they do exist apparently). It's a small thing but it reveals a number of more important issues:

i) In a time when free email accounts offer gigs of storage, why do institutional services offer a poorer service. Is this another argument for the loosely coupled, or at least outsourced systems (as an aside, good to see Niall and Tony making up over their debate around this).

ii) It portrays a top-down attitude from IT providers to how we should use their systems. I am told when I complain that I shouldn't use my inbox as a filing system and I should make offline folders. Wrong, I should use them in whatever way is convenient to me (and see next point about filing).

iii) It is a classic example of Weinberger's distinction between filtering on the way in and filtering on the way out. IT people want me to filter on the way in, that is to save messages to appropriate folders. I want to filter on the way out, that is to search for emails according to different criteria. Faced with information overload, filtering on the way out is the best solution.

So the next time you get a mailbox full message, give them points i) to iii). Then quietly set about deleting your messages.

Why 'will Radiohead make money?' is the wrong question

Ed Felten has a good piece on how the Radiohead experiment can mean they make more money by selling more at a lower price. While I agree with his analysis I think this focus on how the  'you choose the price' model will work misses the point. This is a step along the path to free content so all those who think it's a failure if some people don't pay are looking at it the wrong way - some might pay this time, but next time? Or the time after? Radiohead have a reasonably devoted fanbase who will opt to pay, but for lots of artists that isn't the case - they'll make the choice between fame over fortune. Better to have 1000 people download it for free and generate some buzz than 10 people pay for it.

So the question isn't will Radiohead make money from this release, but rather 'how else might Radiohead make money?' They are offering a proper CD release box set for around £40. This is one model - release for free something that 90% of people will take, and something special for the remaining 10%. This is the sort of thing Gran can buy them for Christmas - 'What does Kevin like?' 'Radiohead' 'Okay, I'll get him the special release'. I would expect to see lots of variations on this - most of an album free and then some special DRM locked bonus tracks you pay for, bundled with some video, interviews, etc. People will crack these and release them free, but for the fan who really wants them they'll be prepared to pay and the rest of us will just take the free stuff.

PS - you may be thinking I am contractually obliged to mention Radiohead in every post at the moment. This is the last one. Probably.

Kindle inches towards the free content scenario

Amazon's Kindle received a lot of positive and negative attention this week. The positives seem to be that people like the device, it goes some way to capturing the tactile and emotional element of book reading, and the connectivity adds another dimension. The negatives seem to be that the DRM and pricing model.

To me though it represents another small step towards the scenario of digital content becoming free. Quoting yourself is bad form I know, but in my post on the Future of content I said

"let us consider what would happen if digital paper really arrived (despite several proclamations digital ink and paper have been stubbornly difficult to realise, but that isn’t the point of my argument). It felt like real paper, you could have it bound in books like real paper, you could write on it like real paper. But crucially the content it displayed could change, you could search it, and it could record all those annotations you made.

Even as something of a bibliophile, this begins to look tempting to me. I like having books as objects on my shelves, but I used to like having vinyl albums and CDs also, but now I only have MP3s (and clear shelves). If digital paper were so good it overcame the 3 benefits of books above, then it would have significant advantages over real paper. "

Kindle isn't there yet, but it's another step along the path. And what we will see happen now is the disintermediation of publishers. As an author I can now publish direct to Kindle. And as Clay Shirky argues, when it comes to a face off between fame vs fortune, fame wins.

Last month Radiohead, this month the Kindle, perhaps the future of content will be with us sooner than even I anticipated.

Connections are more meaningful in the long tail

I can't remember if Chris Anderson made this point, but it came home to me the other day. When you are operating with blockbusters then the connections you make are pretty meaningless since these artists or products have become a commodity, there is very little chance of overlap with other tastes.

Let's take an example of music - I don't really listen to a lot of hip hop/rap (hey, I'm a Smiths fan, what do you expect?) but I like a bit of Kanye West. However, looking up Kanye on iTunes is not really going to find me artists who are similar to him - it wouldn't be a good starting point to get into more rap. This is because he is a popular artist and so the other artists people buy aren't really like him at all. Take a look:

Believe me, I am not going to like any of the similar artists listed here - content discovery in blockbusters breaks down, because the overlap with other content becomes too spread out, so you end up linking only to other blockbusters. But now let's consider a more long tail artist, say the excellent Sufjan Stevens. Now look at the similar artists in iTunes:

I already know and like Midlake, and through this route have discovered Bonnie Prince Billy who has turned out to be a great find, and will check the others also. Content discovery becomes meaningful in the long tail because there is greater similarity between the content.

And the same applies for networking - if I find that someone likes Jaws say, then even though it is one of my favourite films, I wouldn't hold much hope that the other films the person likes would also be of interest. I like Jaws because I consider to be the perfect film in terms of structure and pacing, (and, yes because I like sharks too) but  other people will like it for many different reasons because it will have reached a level of penetration in society that has many different routes to it. But, if we take the Korean horror film, A Tale of Two Sisters, then if I find someone who likes that, I will be much more likely to take their recommendation for other films (the content discovery element), but more importantly, I would probably find dialogue with them more useful aslo.

So what might this mean for education? For a start if we are to encourage content discovery then it shows we need a long tail of educational content. We need a wide range of resources that suit different styles, use different pedagogies and incorporate different media. Even with the investment in OERs we don't have this quantity of content yet.

It also illustrates that if we want to encourage networking between learners, then we need to find tools that help them make meaningful connections. Just being a psychology student isn't sufficient, it will be a mixture of very specific subject interests, plus personal information that will help learners find study buddies who are appropriate.

Blogs easier to read than formal publications

Stunning new research (okay, ten minutes by me this morning) has shown that blogs are much easier to read than formal academic publications, even when they are covering the same topics.

Yesterday Alan Cann put a few bloggers through FLESH, a piece of software that takes text and scores it according to the Flesch Reading Ease Score and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. For the reading ease score, the higher the score then the easier the text is to read. For the grade level it indicates how many years in education a person needs to understand the text. There are some concerns about this method, and the grade level in particular seems dubious to me, and then we have to accept that the software is interpreting it correctly, so lots of room for doubt, but putting that aside for now, I thought I would compare the blog scores Alan obtained with samples of published papers from three of the writers (me, Alan and Grainne).

The papers I used were: Alan's Assessed Online Discussion Groups in Biology Education, Grainne's Using Compendium as a tool to support the design of learning activities (forthcoming) and my Learning Objects, Learning Design, and Adoption through Succession.

Here are the scores for reading ease:

Author	Blog Reading Ease	Paper reading ease
Conole	50.79	32.48
Weller	63.85	34.82
Cann	59.66	36.8

And for reading level:

Author	Blog Reading Ease	Paper reading ease
Conole	12.19	14.2
Weller	9.47	14.04
Cann	9.02	13.55

I'll come on to the reservations later, but at face value this seems to be saying that there is a marked increase in reading difficulty when the same authors write in the formal publication style. Variation for author is controlled, and so to an extent is variation in subject matter, since the papers are all subjects we blog about (this could be controlled more rigorously though, I admit). Which means the variation is down to the medium, or style imposed by that medium. If general understanding is the goal, then this mini-research suggests blogs are better at achieving it.

Now the reservations:

• Obviously a very limited set, would need to be expanded to many different authors and subject areas.
• Reliability of Flesch - are there some peculiarities in the system that mean academic papers always come out as harder to read e.g. use of references.
• Reliability of the software - how reliably is the software interpreting the Flesch method?
• Interpretation of results - what do these really mean?

If someone was looking for a Masters project  that looks like a neat investigation to me (no doubt someone has already done it, so if you know, let me know).