The Ed Techie

How do I? video search

Tony Hirst has created a neat little search interface using Google's Coop customizable search engine. It searches a number of video archives to find instructional videos - he seeds it with the phrase 'How do I?'  He explains it here, so I won't bother, and thus save myself potential embarrassment by getting it wrong.

I will say it returned some very good results for me. I put in a search for How do I.. create a podcast. And the resources it came back with were great. Having just written a piece on podcasting for a course, this reinforces to me the point that increasingly there is little point in me writing guides or even finding resources - students can do much better themselves and find the ones they want. This doesn't make me totally redundant though (my mortgage lender will be pleased to hear), I think my role then is to place podcasts in an academic context by creating meaningful activities and perhaps producing other material which relates to pedagogy, broadcasting, or whatever - ie to make some links to material they might not get through such means. This is a good thing - educators should concentrate on what they do best, not writing how to guides or acting as a search engine.

Tony says he knocked it up in twenty minutes. This also demonstrates the difference in approach in the web 2.0 world 'out there' and the academic world. You just know if this was a university (any university) project it would have been funded for a year, they'd set up careful consultation, draw up a set of user specifications, run some workshops, produce a report, start coding, get to a demo stage that worked only on a very small subset of video, then disband.

Anyway, give it a go.

Future of content - Pt 2 response

Ray Corrigan has responded to my first piece on the Future of Content over on his blog. His is an excellent article, reminding us of the influence of big corporations and setting out the reasons why my view might not come to pass. I recommend reading it all.

For now, here are my responses to some of the points he makes.

"Barlow's meme has often been taken to mean that we should rely on technology and geography and NOT laws, judges or politicians, to protect freedom of speech. Well government censorship of the Net in places like Saudi Arabia and large responsibility for fingering journalists for arrest in China have provided stark indications of totalitarian governments' ability to incorporate the existence of such technologies into their operations.”

But equally they have really struggled to control information. Sure they’ve tried and had some success but this has had more to do with the immaturity of communication technologies, not the increasing ability of governments to censor information. The general trend is towards more freedom of information and as mobile devices and broadcasting/networking equipment become more powerful this will only increase.

"John Naughton tells a wonderful story in his book, A Brief History of the Future, about when Paul Baran wanted to build a packet switching network in the 1960s. Jack Osterman, a senior executive at AT&T, the telecommunications monopolist in the US at the time, said "First, it can’t possibly work, and if it did, damned if we are going to allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves." Look at that word "allow". If the network owners control the networks, who uses them and how they get to use them then the network owners have a veto on innovation, which is the story told by Larry Lessig in the Future of Ideas”

And just look at where AT & T are now – this example demonstrates to me about a company trying to impose old world views on a new world. They just didn’t get it, so it’s not that they could allow, but that they thought they had the right because that’s what they were used to. But users just went elsewhere. This rather backs up Gilmore’s law to me, not undermines it.

"And unfortunately for those who would like content to be free the most powerful actors in the decision making process surrounding the deployment and regulation of the networks that will distribute the content are those who want it to support their profit margins.”

Sure the respective industries want to control it, but the point is they can’t anymore. This is because technologically they’ll always be beaten, and also because the online world allows new market players who will offer an alternative, often a free one. They have to adapt or die – look at photography: Kodak might have wanted to control the print process but ultimately digital cameras and Flickr meant they couldn’t.

"As Lessig says, the content industries, wielding law and technology, have fought a bitter counterrevolution against Napster, DeCSS, CPHack, My.MP3, Grokster, Eldred et al and won, at least in the courts, every time. Though millions of copyrighted works are still circulating online it is an increasingly risky business to engage in such infringement with industrial scale operations the content companies now have in place monitoring this activity and targetting [tens of thousands] of people for legal action.”

This is key to me – you could predict that they would do this. They will always seek to preserve the status quo if that is where their current business model lies. But ultimately the ability to bypass the very need for such industries will mean that all their restrictive DRM will only make them weaker because people will have better alternatives elsewhere. Once the online MP3 and iTunes becomes the main place and format people use to obtain records, the very point of a record company becomes obsolete. So whether they have restrictive DRM and savage lawyers becomes irrelevant, they will be disintermediated. It then becomes in their interest to be open, to seek alternative revenue streams, for example giving music away free but selling merchandise and promoting concerts.

"The architecture of the Internet or cyberspace is programmed in the code, the logical layer and protocols that determine how it operates …The Net - an entirely artificially created entity”

This is true, but it doesn’t mean it’s an entirely controllable or predictable entity. I heard Robert Cailliau, a colleague of Tim Berners-Lee, once argue that we were reaching the edges of our understanding of the complexity in the net. He joked that maybe it was using us to get built. Just as artificial life simulations are artificially created they can still produce patterns and activity that are entirely unpredictable, so the net is better viewed as an ecosystem than a piece of code that can be tweaked to make it do what you want.

Which brings me to Tim O'Reilly's Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution which offers six lessons for the media revolution which though outlined in the relative ancient history of 2002 still, I think, hold true today:

Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation

Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.

Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.

Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.

Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service

Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it.

The key ones in the current context being lesson 5, 6 and 7.”

Thanks for adding these in – I meant to in my post and forgot. For me, I’d say it was 1 and 5. 1 is similar to Shirky’s second law – it implies that creators would rather give content away than have it locked down and be obscure. Given the choice between fame and fortune, fame wins. And 5 is exactly right – they threaten existing publishers who will fight to stop them – but they’ll lose.

Tim O'Reilly: "The question then, is not the death of book publishing, music publishing, or film production, but rather one of who will be the publishers”

I’d agree with this and conclude that increasingly ‘we’ are the publishers and as such ‘we’ don’t have the vested interest in controlling rights, because of Shirky’s second law.

Though Adam Smith and Garrett Hardin [Tragedy of the Commons] might dispute the notion that individual participants in Web 2.0 activities, unlike Dawkin's selfish gene, would behave in the best interests of the system as a whole thereby speeding the evolutionary process)”

I knew a natural selection analogy was always a bit dangerous and open to misinterpretation, but just to clarify. The reason I say it speeds the evolutionary process is that natural selection doesn’t have sight of the overall objective, it isn’t an intelligent entity making decisions. Whereas people producing content obviously are, so you don’t have to wait for random changes to make improvements. My recourse to natural selection was to demonstrate that massive distribution can produce amazing complexity, indeed is probably the best way to get complexity. The more obvious analogy is with software production, where the top-down proprietary (read Microsoft) approach is struggling now against the distributed open source approach in producing complex, robust software.

The new morning routine

I have a morning routine now, which has evolved over the past year or so. It's remarkably different from even a couple of years ago, largely as a result of becoming a blogger I think. Here it is:

After the school run I sit at the laptop with a cup of tea and bowl of muesli (if I'm indulging - marmite on toast).

1. Firstly, I check email, delete all the spam messages, do any quick responses, and mark any more detailed ones for later.
2. I check messages in the student forum for the course I run.
3. So far, so 1990s. Next I go to my blog, check stats, and comments and respond on any comments.
4. Then I pop in to Facebook, check my news feed, update status and look at any messages or notifications.
5. By this time Twitteroo is loaded so I catch up on all the tweets from the US or Canada of the people I am following. I follow any urls that have been twitted and look interesting.
6. Lastly, to Google Reader to look at any new blog posts of the 112 blogs I subscribe to. I will scan most of these, ignore a few, read some, and respond to maybe one or two.
7. Now I'm ready to start work.

And here's some thought on what this routine reveals:

• It's a mixture of social and professional. Most of my Facebook friends, blogs and Tweeters are professional peers but what they post is often a mix of social updates and relevant resources.
• I'm more connected to what is happening in my field than I was before. I didn't used to start every day by reading an academic journal, but I will usually find one academically interesting post or resource before I've finished my cup of tea.
• It's expanding. Since being a blogger I have had the additional burden/privilege of tending one's own blog garden, but also I have become a much more active blog reader, so now have a lot of posts to get through in my aggregator. And then I added Facebook in to the mix, and more recently Twitter. I don't seem to have dropped anything though. At this rate my morning routine will be my all day routine.
• I'm developing new skills in scanning, interpreting, reading and writing. Given the expansionist desires of my morning routine, I have developed further skills in information processing - I'm not on a par with ultra bloggers, but I can scan my Google reader list quickly, and determine which posts to follow. It may not be always reliable, but it is reliable enough. I know how to get in to Facebook, get what I want and get out quickly. I am currently trying to develop my Twitter voice (more on this in a later post).

Any other activities that should form part of a connected morning routine?

The future of content -Pt 1

[Note - this is part of a distributed article, see previous post for explanation]

The Future of Content

In this section I am going to argue that digital content will move toward being free and widely available because of two complementary arguments: the argument from economics and the argument from quality.

The argument from economics

Where content can be digitised, it is having a profound effect on the economics that underlie the business model of that content, and the way society uses and thinks about it. In this opening section I want to look at two examples of how the digitisation of content has led to significant changes in a number of industries.

Newspapers

Many newspapers ignored the online world for too long, assuming their customers would want their news that way. Now that they have been forced to shift all of their content online, they are finding new business models to cope with this. The initial hope was that essentially the same model would apply, that people would pay for content. But the pay per copy, micropayment and subscription model have all failed. Most recently the New York Times closed its TimesSelect subscription business and made its content free. Apart from it not making enough money, the reason seems to be that the subscription model harmed the alternative model of advertising, which is driven by the global audience finding their content.

Vivian Schiller of The Times comments “What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo … our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising”. In other words, it is better to be free to all of the market than paid for by a small section.

Music

Another example of the massive changes wrought in an industry by the digitisation of content is the music industry, which like newspapers was slow, and resistant, to change. The wake-up call for the music industry was Napster, when suddenly millions of users were exchanging songs and albums without paying. This was partly a result of wanting to have something for free, but it was also because Napster facilitated behaviour which was the content discovery and the social function of music. Through Napster users could find other bands that were similar, sample different types of music, find other users with similar tastes and, most importantly, do all this from their laptop.

Eventually, iTunes saw the industry find a model that seemed to suit both parties. Users could download individual tracks at relatively low cost, and also engage in the content discovery through shared playlists.

LastFm and Pandora take this social aspect a stage further, by data mining users actions to build up a network of artists, so that you only need enter an artist’s name and be able to have a personalised radio station playing similar tracks. You can also find users with similar tastes, join groups, see upcoming events, etc. You can’t own music through these sites and you can’t request a specific album, but when the richness of the choice becomes so great, maybe that becomes less significant. And meanwhile the file sharing software is back, with applications such as Limewire allowing users to share files again.

The internet has also changed the relationship of the recording artist to the record companies. Increasingly bands are establishing an online presence, allowing free downloads of their music to build a following, touring, and recording an album, and only then seeking a label. Even this last stage will become redundant once CDs finally disappear. As Chris Anderson puts it in the Long Tail

“At this point, the artists don't need the labels any more. The consumers don't need the labels any more and I think the labels, rather than trying to protect what business they have, need to ask themselves what is their relevance."

Changing our relationship to content

I’ve concentrated just on two of the more obvious examples here, but there are many more. For instance, where audio goes, video will follow once the bandwidth is sufficient. So for traditional television broadcast we are seeing subscription models becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. This has been partly affected by the BitTorrent type sharing services that allow the download of large AV files. At the moment this remains something of a technical skill, but as it becomes more viable and easier, then DVDs will go the way of CDs.

As well as changing the underlying economics of the industry, it alters the way we relate to the original product. To return to music again, in Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger suggests that digitisation of content has altered our perceptions of what we thought was the basic unit of musical output:

"For decades we've been buying albums. We thought it was for artistic reasons, but it was really because the economics of the physical world required it: Bundling songs into long-playing albums lowered the production, marketing, and distribution costs ... As soon as music went digital, we learned that the natural unit of music is the track."

Nick Carr disagrees with Weinberger, stating the artistic structure of the album, using Exile on Main Street as an example but Clay Shirky argues that if this were so, then it would survive digitisation. When you look on iTunes this is not borne out - most people download Tumbling Dice.

Digitisation has made the track the currency, and then users have begun to create their own playlists by mixing tracks together. In addition, attendance at concerts and festivals is on the increase – people will pay for the live event, but less so for the content that supports it. Digitisation has changed our relationship to music, artists and record companies. Forever.

Shirky’s Second Law and the Content Law

In 2003 Clay Shirky wrote an article called Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content, in which he argued that micropayments (which he defined as "payments of between a quarter and a fraction of a penny,”) would fail. At the time there was considerable interest, and belief, in micropayments as a model for internet enterprise. He said of the failed attempts of micropayments that “they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response.” Whereas analogue publishing has inherent costs, essentially the cost of the format, storage and transportation, digital publishing doesn’t. The cost involved then is that of the creators, and online the creator can become the publisher. They will then be faced with a dilemma, Shirky argues, of fame or fortune. In an analogue publishing world you could have both, since in order to achieve fame lots of people need to have read your book, or bought your album. If online people are resistant to paying then charging for your content limits your fame potential. As he puts it in a follow up posting in 2007, creators are “in the position of having to decide between going for audience size (fame) or restricting and charging for access (fortune), and that the desire for fame, no longer tempered by reproduction costs, would generally win out.”

We’ll call this Shirky’s second law (the first is generally given as “Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality”, a precursor to the long tail), that is given the choice between fame and fortune, fame wins out.

This, combined with what we have seen above led me to propose the content law, which I think embodies what will happen to content in the future:

"Digital content wants to be free, and will seek the path to maximum access."

In their book Blown to Bits, Evans and Wurster argued that the digital marketplace has seen the unbundling of the economics of information and physical product. This is most readily seen in retail, where you have to see the physical object in a shop to know about it, but online the product information is separated out. David Weinberger explores the implications of this unbundling further, in that it allows infinite recategorisation because the information, unlike the physical product, can be in multiple places at once.

Let’s consider a possible future example, that of books. When the web first became popular there were some suggestions that books would disappear since we could download free ones. This did not come to pass for a number of reasons:

1. Transportability – books are easy to carry about, and don’t run out of battery life, can be used on a train and don’t require a special device.

2. Ease of use – books don’t require special help programmes, can be used by most of the population, have good navigation features and are good at presenting text, compared with the small screens of some hand held devices.

3. Cultural value – we cherish books as social artifacts. Few things cause as much outrage amongst civilised people as seeing books being burnt or desecrated. People have a deep affection towards the tactile nature of a book.

For these reasons, and combined with the advanced content discovery facilitated by Amazon and co, book sales have done very well since the arrival of the net. But 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.

What would the book publishing industry look like then? I would suggest that Shirky’s Second Law and the Content Law would take over. What would be the role of publishers? If you can download a copy of book into your digital paper book, then a good deal of what the publisher does disappears. They don’t need to provide the printing, binding, or distribution. What they can provide is the marketing. But this is where Shirky’s second law becomes relevant – some authors will start to give their content away cheaply (since unless you’re JK Rowling, most of the cost of a book goes to the retailer and publisher to cover all the costs associated with analogue format). As an author you may only get 10% and have to do most of the work, so why not sell it for that and generate interest online? Then another author decides that actually what they’ll do is give their book away free, because that way people link to it, quote from it, mash it up with Google map overlays, or whatever. Being free and open generates a lot more traffic.

For the industry as a whole the content law is now in operation. Books are now digital content that wants to be free and to have the maximum audience. Publishers need to find a new business model and relevance or they disappear.

As George Siemens puts it "Consumers, like learners will in the future, have a dramatically different relationship with content than they have had in the past. Textbook publishers, journals, and other content-centric industries need to take heed of these lessons and adjust before they become the next statistic.”

The argument from quality

The argument I have given above suggests that economics will be the main driving factor in the liberation of content and has focused on individuals or small groups creating content. A second factor is that it will improve the quality of a lot of content through the distribution of the process.

Here we have a powerful analogy in the process of natural selection which shows us that a vastly distributed process can produce things of great complexity. As Daniel Dennett argues in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Darwin’s great contribution was to remove the need for top down intervention (or sky hooks in his metaphor) in any explanation of how biological complexity is achieved:

"Cranes can do the lifting work our imaginary skyhooks might do, and they do it in an honest, non-question-begging fashion… Skyhooks are miraculous lifters, unsupported and insupportable. Cranes are no less excellent as lifters, and they have the decided advantage of being real.” (pg 75).

The blind, but distributed process of natural selection was sufficient to do all the ‘lifting’ required in biological design space. Natural selection is distributed over many individuals in a species and over a very long time span. This allows for small, but incremental changes to produce cumulative complexity. The internet allows for similar distribution across individuals, but unlike natural selection, each participant is not dumb, or blind, to the process, thus the overall process is speeded up considerably, and we don’t have to wait millions of years for the results.

What the internet, and web 2.0 in particular, achieves is this massive distribution of the task. Just as prior to Darwin there was no way of conceiving of biological complexity without some designer, without top-down input, so many of the web 2.0 critics fail to understand how you can achieve the relevant sophistication required for, an encyclopaedia say, without a heavily controlled, centralised, top-down process. The democratisation of process that web 2.0 has wrought is key to understanding why they are wrong.

Take photography as an example. There are a lot of people out there who are quite good photographers, some of whom are ignorant of the very specialist skills required, but who have a natural talent, others who have some knowledge, and others still who are specialist in certain types of photography. They were all largely ignorant though of the process required to become professional photographers, of how to share their photographs when the sharing is controlled by the economics of distribution and a top down authority. With the advent of Flickr all of these people can now share their photographs. The result is an explosion of creativity, and real, undeniable high quality photographs.

What the web 2.0 critics would say is that if you compare any photographer at random from Flickr with any random professional photographer then the second will win out, because they have been through the filtering process. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the distributed process that is now in place. Sure, if you pick any photographer at random on Flickr then you probably find very average family snaps, but the result of the process as a whole is the production of islands of complexity. And what is more, because the traditional filtering process in the top-down model tends to make professional opinion converge, what you get from the bottom up process is a far greater range of inventiveness and style. In evolutionary terms, the first process is like inter-breeding while the second is akin to broadening the gene pool.

This is what critics such as Andrew Keen fail to appreciate in their criticism of web 2.0 and user generated content. It is not the comparison of any one individual with another, or any one artefact, that is significant, but comparison between the processes. And when it comes to producing complexity, mass distribution wins every time.

So the second reason why content will become free is that only by removing it from behind the confines of payment and strict rights control, can certain types of content be improved. We have seen this in software of course with open source, and with general knowledge in wikipedia, but it also occurs on a smaller basis with blog posts, podcasts, etc where the overall product is improved by making it open, and then incorporating user comments and feedback.

[Over to Ray Corrigan for the second part of this]

Structured, distributed blog article starts today

I am starting something of an experiment today for the rest of this week.

I am going to construct an article by structuring a debate across four blogs. The article is around the future of content and starts in my next post.

The plan is:

Monday - I post a piece on where I think digital content is going, arguing that it is moving towards being free and widely distributed.

Tuesday - Ray Corrigan is going to post a piece responding to mine which looks at how digital rights may make it a more, not less, controlled future for content.

Wednesday - Patrick McAndrew will focus it on education by bringing in the perspective from open educational resources.

Thursday - Will Woods will look at some of the relevant technologies and how these might impact.

Friday - we'll draw some conclusions.

I also hope that by Friday we can bring in comments that people have made. I've no idea if this will work, but in the spirit of opennes I'm willing to give it a try in public. Depending on the end result I may even try and re-edit it into a 'proper' publication.

Feel free to join in - I've structured it carefully so it doesn't just fizzle out, but blog responses would be great.

That Stephen Fry post

As you may have seen Stephen Fry has started a blog, and his first post was on smart phones and the iPhone in particular. It received so much traffic that it fell over and they're currently upgrading it. That aside, several things occurred to me after reading it:

i) It has to be the longest post I've ever read. I love this variety in blogs - they can be whatever size, tone or format you want. One of my favourite bloggers is Christopher Sessums who doesn't post very frequently, although he does post regularly, about once a week, but his posts are always thoughtful and more akin to essays or articles. But I'm also a big fan of John Naughton's blog, and John tends to have several short posts a day, that pull in interesting pieces from all over the place. You can't get that variety in many other media. It remains to be seen if Stephen Fry can maintain posts of this length though.

ii) It is incredibly well informed. For a while I wondered if it was some tech geek pretending to be Stephen Fry. In a society that seems to treasure stupidity (the recent Big Brother winner asked 'who's Shakespeare?') it is refreshing to have one who is so well informed. What other celebrity would talk so knowledgeably about 'server side apps'?

iii) It's interesting that even Stephen Fry can't have an outlet for his technophilia in traditional broadcast media, and felt a blog was the best outlet. This shows that technology and engineering are very under-served in traditional media, particularly TV. They just don't know what to do with it, maybe because it doesn't lend itself to TV very well, or because it's too complex for TV producers to get. But considering so many of us spend a lot of our time thinking about, arguing over, developing for technology, it is remarkably absent in many of the traditional media.  Which is why it is covered so extensively online I guess.

Prof in ICT post at the OU

I've been asked to flush out any candidates for a Professor of ICT here at the OU, in the newly formed department. Details here: http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=3263&ref=ext If you're of Professorial quality (I know you're thinking - if you're one, how hard can it be?) come and join us, there's lots of interesting people here (and me). Don't contact me for any further info though - I don't know any more than is here.

Dylan viral marketing

(Hat tip: Stuart Brown) As you may know, I'm a sucker for viral marketing - it's like normal marketing but fun. To promote the new Dylan Greatest Hits, they created a make your own Bob video site. You can add the text in. Here is my one:

Listphile - a man thing?

(via Dan Taylor) I have had a play with Listphile a site that lets you (yes you've guessed it) create and share lists. Yes, that's it - it never ceases to amaze me how small some of the ideas behind these web 2.0 startups are. You create a list which you can pull different media in to and others can edit it.

Although it's a small idea, you can see how this might grow. Rather like the real world, in the online world there is an almost infinite variety of very small ecological niches that some company (organism) will exploit. Making and sharing lists won't change your life, but it is something we do a lot. I used to carry a  personal top ten films, novels, Spurs players lists in my head, which were often readjusted, as if I was going to be asked by a journalist for these at any moment. I think this is a man thing, men like making lists (readers of this blog will know I'm not averse to a list).

So, just to test it out, and not because I like making lists or anything, here's my Asian horror film list. Feel free to add to, or edit, it.

I was going to add in some potential educational uses here to justify my playing with it, but instead (in a smug, postmodern, self referential way) I've created a Listphile list - Educational uses of Listphile. Actually when you start doing this it does seem like a really useful tool - I've done this list with a formal education cohort of students in mind, but you could apply the same to a broader subject community. Some of these would be really useful I think - best research question and best resource in particular. So much so, I think I'll add them in to my course next year. I would really like you to add this list (the Asian horror one, less so).

Teach the people - would you sign up?

Teach the People is a social networking site with an emphasis on learning. It's not up and running yet, so I've registered for a beta invite. It has more of a content focus than a lot of the other sites, claiming that

"Instead of just messaging with other users like on traditional social networking services, users on Teach The People^SM are creating their own communities for fun, education, innovation; whatever! User can then fill those communities with as much content & media as they desire"

I hope it works, but I'm not sure myself, and this was based on my initial reaction - I didn't instantly get the point as one does with social networking sites where the emphasis is on casual interaction. This goes back to a point I made earlier about whether learning is intrinsically a bit dull? Maybe if you want a learning focus you have to do one of two things:

i) Start with an existing social networking community and introduce learning tools and services in to it. For example, help people use Facebook to aid their vocational tasks, informal learning or formal studies.

ii) Start with an existing learning community and provide it with social networking tools. Take the OU students and alumni for example and provide them with an environment that helps facilitate social interaction, and learning.

In short you need a critical mass starting either from the social or the learning camps. Teach the people may be trying to do both at once, which is too steep a curve to climb. Anyway, when I get my beta invite I'll be able to have a more thorough investigation.