The Ed Techie

Blogging vid

I have given two blogging talks recently (or more acurately, the same talk twice). I have used the following YouTube video. The quality isn't great and some people don't find it funny, but I think it's hilarious.

What are you an analogue snob about?

I was contacted yesterday by someone writing a piece for The Times on parental snobbery. They had come across my posting on My Own Leisure Snobbery and wanted to know if they could use it. By the way, having just done two blogging talks this was a minor example of the economics of reputation concept - this person would never have contacted me normally. In my response I mentioned that I was an occassional anaologue snob, and that being an analogue snob was a sure giveaway of being a digital immigrant, to use Prensky's term.

I recounted the story of when we were in a restaurant recently and my daughter and her cousin were swapping pictures via their Nintendo DSs. I used to be a bit judgemental about kids sitting there with gameboys, but that was before I had my own child, and I realised what a Godsend they were. There was a table behind us of older people who were casting disapproving looks at the children though for this blatant display of digitalness. It struck me that if the children were swapping pictures on bits of paper, then everyone would think it was sweet.

This made me reflect on what I was an analogue snob about. Not that much, but two things came to mind:

• Watches - I have an automatic with a glass back so you can see the movement, and I think it is a thing of wonder. It gains about 5 minutes a week and is much less reliable than a digital watch, but I have always felt proper watches should have a movement.
• Art - it's got to have paint, canvas and stuff you know?

Now I think these are justifiable snobberies, that in these cases analogue is simply better, but maybe not. For some people photography would be another case (not me, I'm a point and click merchant). So, what's the thing your an analogue snob about?

[Update - the piece in the Times by Michele Kirsch was published here, although it got rather trimmed down in favour of an advert apparently. Not a problem one has with blogging I will snootily point out]

Blogging workshop

I ran a blogging workshop the other day with Tony Hirst. It was only a small audience but seemed to go well. My main aim was to get across the idea that keeping a blog is both an academically valid activity and also really beneficial for the individual. I used most of the reasons I have listed before here and here. For me I would say the two strongest points are that it provides a useful means of engaging with technology, a base camp in the online world as it were, and that of all the academic activity I engage in, blogging is the one I probably enjoy the most (apart from having drinks in a bar at a conference in Hawaii, say, which is also quite nice). It is where a lot of the stuff you came into academia for in the first place, but has been eroded by increased administration, workloads and formal metrics (casts disapproving look at RAE), still persists - for example, lively debate, creativity, new ideas, good humour, collegiality, the progressive development of half-formed concepts through dialogue, etc.

A small aside - I tried to make the presentation more graphics heavy and less word intensive. In other words I was trying to increase its glanceability - it took me a lot longer to produce, with the inevitable conclusion that glanceability is hard. Reminds me of the Nathaniel Hawthorne quote 'Easy reading is damn hard writing.'

Slideshare file below:

What does the Facebook API extravaganza tell us?

I know everyone has blogged about the recent openning up of Facebook to allow lots of new applications, but hey, it's half term and I've only just got around to looking at it. Tony Hirst makes the point that it's beginning to look like a learning environment. I've had a play with it, looked at the widgets, updated some stuff and here are some random thoughts on what it signifies:

• Technology acts as a pull factor - I've gone back to Facebook because I wanted to see what new widgets they had (I added in the LastFM one). This demonstrates something I was talking about with the openlearn guys last week, that is by doing fun stuff with technology you drive traffic to your site from the users of that technology who are keen to see how it is being used. In educational terms this means doing fun stuff with educational content so that people want to see what you've done with Google maps, or twitter say.
• The social network is the starting point - rather than content being the main focus and creating a network around this, Facebook demonstrates that the network is the key asset, and then you add value to this.
• Adding features generates interest - I keep finding things in Facebook that I need to do. I'm not an avid user, so for instance I've only just joined a network (the Open University) and a group (Educational Technologists). But having these tasks makes me want to come back and see what else I can do. The educational point is that often we resist adding more features or tasks for fear it will confuse students. I've written about this in the VLE book - that a lot of the web 2.0 approach (of which rapid development is one) is at odds with higher education approaches (such as testing and scoping  features rigorously). What the pull in to Facebook illustrates is that more features creates a more vibrant environment. Not rocket science I admit, but still not something we necessarily apply to VLEs.
• Openness is the key to development - if we didn't know it before, then the Facebook example provides further evidence that open APIs and mixing of 3rd party software is the way to create a dynamic, vibrant site. The educational point is that most VLEs and many universities still want to create their own versions of tools.

I mentioned some work we were doing on a new social network based model of learning, which looks to be moving forward. It strikes me that 'Facebook + some educational widgets + open content' wouldn't be a bad starting point.

Academic publishing - what's the point?

I had a message today saying that an article (The distance from isolation) I submitted to the journal Computers and Education has been published. Good news one might have thought, except check the date it was submitted - November 2004. That's three years to publish an article (admittedly it was available online a year after submission). Now, it's a good article and all that, but it's hardly current. For a start I address three technologies, but web 2.0 doesn't get a mention since the phrase hadn't been coined then. If I was writing it now, this would certainly form the crux of my argument (which thankfully has held up reasonably well).

Not all journals take this long to publish, but it does make you wonder what is the point of journal publication? In a classic example of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it seems that the function of journals is now to feed the Research Assessment Exercise. Initially the RAE used publications as an indication of the quality of research. Now it is the justification for the journals themselves. I learn a lot more from blogs now than I do journals, and I have also noticed that since keeping a blog I have published fewer 'proper' articles. Surely journals can't survive when they a) cost a lot of money, b) are out of date and c) don't facilitate the type of engaging debate you find in the blogosphere.

I know people will put down the marker of quality here, but I think a blog posting does undergo a form of peer review - if you post something stupid you can bet someone will tell you. And there are a host of metrics that indicate the quality of a blog, such as your technorati authority (mine remains doggedly low).

I've had some discussions with people at the OU about whether we should start encouraging and recognising blogging as an academic activity. I would like to see this,  but I don't want the RAE or the OU to start formalising the process, since this will stifle it. The moral here seems to be that formal metrics kill creativity. From a career perspective it is best to have a high ranking in the former, but for your own devlopment (and ultimately the health of the organisation), you want to be in the creativity camp.

Finding the message in medium

I had a play with medium the other day. It's an interesting bit of software - it installs a sidepanel on your browser and then creates a visual radar of sites similar to the one you are visiting. You can see which other medium users are at these sites. You chat with them by putting out a general call on the bulletin board. I found it a bit disconcerting though, having these people watch the sites you visit. You can make yourself anonymous, but even so the thought of being observed feels rather intrusive, and so I turned it off and it has remained that way since. I also found the means of communicating didn't really lend itself to decent conversation with people posting rather banal comments.

As I said in an earlier post on Gabbly, I think there is something in these tools for e-learning as they can promote informal discussion around content. I think medium would need to work on the group allocation though - I can see it being a good tool for an agreed set of users to collaborate on a specific task, for instance a tutor group could perform online research using it. There is a friends option, so maybe this could perform that function (as usual I didn't have any friends so couldn't experiment) but I think you'd want to allow simple group allocation and lose the general waffle.

The scrobbling of sites you visit to create the web radar is a good idea also, although I don't want others observing what I do (not that I do anything unsavoury, unless one counts going to some Spurs discussion sites).

Is Nielsen a stickability kinda guy?

A few people (including Dawud Miracle) have blogged about Jacob Nielsen (it is law that I have to use the term 'usability guru' here) and his interview with the BBC where he suggested web 2.0 was neglecting good design. Nielsen speaks good sense sometimes (I particularly like his top 10 UI bloopers in Hollywood), but I've always found his design rules rather steadfast, or rather that people taken them and apply them too rigourously. I remember sitting in a meeting with the ill-fated UKeU and someone gave us a lecture on usability, based entirely on Nielsen, which was to form the basis of their VLE design. I pointed out that a VLE was not like a shopping site where users want to get in and out quickly, but was somewhere users spent a lot of time - weeks, months even. They would sacrifice some of the principles of good design over utility - e.g. they'll happily have lots of information on the page if it saves them lots of clicks to get back to the same point.

Anyway, although Nielsen is sort of right, and users tend to add widgets and content to sites with the same respect for design as you'll find for plot in say, a William Burroughs novel, I think he's also missing the point. MySpace sites are truly awful in their design, and yet there is something refreshing in their chaotic assemblage. Not being tied down by design laws has really liberated all those people (okay, all those teenagers) who want to create a site they feel reflects them. A teenager's mind isn't a very orderly place, and the sites reflect that. But this take it and mix it all up in a novel, unpredicatble way is part of the essence of web 2.0, and if design suffers a bit through that, it may be a price worth paying as from the mess genuinely exciting things emerge.

The other point is that Nielsen has been critical of RSS and blogs, and I wonder if he's not still stuck on stickability as it were. As Tim O'Reilly argues the shift from stickiness to syndication is one of the web 2.0 transformations. Nielsen made his name in a stickability world, and in many ways it's in his interest to keep promoting this view as this is where his company make their money. But in a syndication world, I am in charge of the design in my Netvibes, Pageflakes, or whatever site. I want others to provide good content, but I don't need them to provide the design. In rather the same way that the internet unbundled the information about a product from the product itself, so web 2.0 unbundles design and content.

When I missed the Gabbly bus

No. 2 in an occassional series of things I didn't follow up on (see When I missed the wiki bus). A few years ago I suggested that we develop a tool that allowed instant messaging on a specific page, ie it showed you who was reading that page at the same time and you could chat with them. This was intended for study, so students reading the same page in a VLE could say 'I don't get this, do you?'. I even had a natty name for it - 'StudyBuddy'. Of course, nothing ever came of it, but recently I've been looking at Gabbly (possibly as a tool for the FLOSScom summer school), which does exactly this. I think this incidental 'I've bumped in to someone else around a resource' type of dialogue has huge potential for e-learning.

Andreas Meiszner pointed me at me.dium.com (I hate these urls that split up a word, I can never remember them. Delicious has a lot to answer for) which potentially looks even better, although I have twice applied to participate and not heard anything back, so can't verify this yet.

I still think StuddyBuddy is a better name...

OpenLearn conference

Patrick McAndrew (keep blogging Patrick!) sent me a call for papers for an open learn conference here at the OU, which might be of interest to some readers:

The call for papers is open for the openlearn 2007 conference: researching open content in education. Deadline for submission by short papers (~1000words) is 31st May 2007. The conference will be held 30-31 October 2007 near The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. There will be no charge for attendance with priority for registration given to those responding to the call for papers. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education.

The four main themes are:

• Research agenda,
• Sustainability,
• User experience,
• Software and tools

Further information can be found at: http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/openlearn2007

Forms for submission of papers can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/openlearn2007/papers.php and should be emailed to [email protected] by 31st May 2007.

Value of EdTechie

John pointed me at this Cyberwire site which calculates the monetary value of your site - pointless but irresistible. Mine is worth $5,662. For one moment I thought that was a monthly figure, but it's annual. We always said we didn't do it for money didn't we? (and I bet if I did start plugging this site for adverts as much as they suggest the traffic would wane).