The Ed Techie

My daughter's music - now with live playlist

In my earlier post on my daughter's playlist I wondered if there was a way of pulling the playlist in from iTunes. Of course there is, and of course Tony Hirst pointed me at it, but what was interesting was that actually I didn't even bother to look in iTunes. I think of Apple as such an obsessively proprietary organisation that they wouldn't bother to do something so open. So this is just by way of a test.

Open as to...

The OU's internal curriculum and technology conference ran over the last couple of days. As with all such events it is both inspiring and a bit deflating. Inspiring because you get to hear of all the good stuff going on and see the enthusiasm of your colleagues. Deflating because things you want to happen still seem a long way off, and some of the same old arguments keep coming up.

One of the thoughts that occurred to me (not for the first time) was that the OU now needs to establish a new definition of openness, and by extension, new identity for itself. The OU's mission statement is:

open to people, places, methods and ideas

Now these are all good, I don't want to do away with any (although I sometimes might question the how much the methods one is true), but I think we could extend this to open as to technology and content. Here's why: increasingly the tools people use as part of their everyday lives are far more sophisticated than universities can create and (more significantly) maintain. We're going to have to accept that people have these tools and don't want a separate (inferior) set for learning. The walled garden approach is becoming less and less viable. Similarly, the amount and quality of content available makes the creation of bespoke content a much less useful way of spending time for an academic. But obviously we need to do something, so what we do is offer some good quality content, we construct good learning activities and we offer support and guidance (as well as all that accreditation stuff).

The other aspect of openness that struck me was that, like all unis, our VLE requires authentication to access. As soon as you do this you are cut off from the connected world. You can't use cool tools like Gabbly (unless you install a university version), and you can't subscribe to feeds. This came home to me in a workshop Tony Hirst ran, and he has a good rant on how the OU is failing to grasp the significance of RSS. Now there are a lot of reasons why a VLE needs to be closed (rights, privacy, etc), but increasingly it looks like a high price to pay.

I gave a talk on the broadcast strategy, which looked at how things have changed and suggests some new models for how broadcast could be used in teaching. Slideshare file below:

My daughter's music

My five year old daughter has her own playlist on iTunes. It is reasonably good:

• The Automatic - Monster
• Coldplay - Yellow
• Kanye West - Touch the Sky
• Madonna - Sorry
• The Blood Arm - Suspicious character
• Cliff Richard - Batchelor Boy
• The Feeling - Never be lonely
• Scissor Sisters - I don't feel like dancing
• JET - Are you gonna be my girl
• Just Jack - Starz in their eyes
• Kaiser Chiefs - Ruby
• Kooks - Naive
• The View - Same jeans

Is there a way of pulling in an iTunes playlist by the way? I don't want Tony Hirst to accuse me of being clunky again :)

You will notice the one fly in the ointment in the playlist - Cliff. She does love Cliff, and I had to endure 'Devil Woman' on repeat the other day. She will be very embarrassed about this one day.

I was thinking that when I was five I had a record of Pinky and Perky singing Somewhere over the rainbow and that was about it. I think her playlist demonstrates a few things. The first is the ubiquity of music - we will be in Tesco and she will hear the Kaiser Chiefs and say 'I love this!' The second is that music was probably more significant to my generation than it was to my parents, and so she has picked up on the stuff we listen to. The third thing is that the trend towards the song as granularity rather than the artist is already evident. (Bloody) Cliff aside she doesn't really like a particular artist, just songs and because we can access these immediately she builds up her playlist as she hears things, rather than having to go to a shop to get it (that already seems an age ago - 'I'm going in to town tomorrow to buy the new Clash album'). Lastly, there isn't much permanence to this - it will evolve and change. I should save, or burn it on to a CD - your first playlist now replaces your first bike as an artifact of nostalgia.

Cardiff the slow city

I live in Cardiff, which I think is a great city - it's the right size, it's got a strong identity, it's got good facilities, we have some great coastline nearby and the wonderful Brecon beacons behind us. It now turns out that it is also Britain's most laid back city. Some recent research has measured the pace at which people walk, which has increased by 10% over the past decade or so, but Cardiff came out as having the slowest walking pace. That's because we're not in a rush, we're enjoying ourselves. And it was also found to be a fairly honest city in a not very scientific study. But why am I telling you this? I don't want all you rushy types coming here and speeding it up...

Educator as DJ

James Cridland gave a good presentation today at the OU's internal curriculum and technology conference, talking about the Virgin radio site, and more significantly about the changing nature of broadcast. I'm presenting tomorrow on the broadcast strategy and so his talk had a lot of resonance with me. What struck me when listening to James was that radio now has to compete with the likes of LastFM, and indeed Virgin has a similar social networking site (which I must admit I was unaware of). Given that you can find the music you like and listen to a much greater range of stuff through the likes of LastFM, what makes people want to listen to broadcast radio? The answer is, I guess, the DJ. I wonder if there is an analogy between the tension between radio and LastFM and education and open educational resources here. Just as LastFM provides free content, but some people like a DJ to put context around it, so OER provides free educational content but the educator (or academic institution) puts it into context and provides guidance. So, educators are like DJs, but without so many annoying catchphrases.

Peter Knight RIP

My boss, Peter Knight, passed away suddenly at the weekend. This has come as a shock to those of us in the Institute of Educational Technology. I liked Peter a lot, he was always supportive of me (it was his idea to take study leave to write the VLE book), and keen to engage with new technologies and ways of thinking. He was a reader of this blog and would often send me comments and thoughts on postings.

Open University bloggers

Following on from my previous post, I thought I would compile a list of current bloggers at the OU. Actually Tony Hirst had (as always) already done it, so the list below is mainly his. I've restricted it to blogs that have some life in them (a low threshold this one - one post this year is enough to qualify) and are by people working at the OU, ie not students (there is much more activity on the student front).

A couple of things strike me about the list: a) considering the size of the OU, it's not exactly big is it? b) most bloggers seem to be in the ed tech, programming, open learn side of things. My worry about this is that non ed techie people think that blogging isn't something relevant to them, and as they suspected all along, it's a nerd thing. I wonder how this list compares across other universities and what the differentiating factors might be? For instance does a top-down blogging initiative have any affect? Does the presence of one or two big name bloggers cause a trickle down? Does the institution's general attitude to technology influence uptake (for example, my guess would be that MIT has a stronger blog presence)?

Here is the list, I'd be happy to hear of any more:

Tony Hirst - http://ouseful.info

John Naughton - http://memex.naughtons.org/

Ray Corrigan - http://b2fxxx.blogspot.com/

Marc Eisenstadt http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/marc/

James Aczel http://h809.blogspot.com/

Doug Clow http://dougclow.wordpress.com

Patrick McAndrew - http://ochre.wordpress.com

Errm, me - http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/

Laura Dewis and Stuart Brown - http://conclave.open.ac.uk/openair

Alex Little - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/alex

Steve Godwin - http://openlearn.blogspot.com/index.html

Niall Sclater - http://sclater.com/blog/

Juliette White - http://www.jvvw.com/index.php

Graphics blog - http://blogs.open.ac.uk/LTS/csn47/

Guy Carberry http://conclave.open.ac.uk/guycarberry/

Library - http://libraryissues.blogspot.com/index.html

Mikele Pasin - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/mikele/blog

Peter Scott - http://sixfields.open.ac.uk/peterblog/index.html

Andrew Brasher - http://conclave.open.ac.uk/brasherblog/

Encouraging educators to blog

As part of the broadcast strategy review, I've been asked to produce a document that sets out how we can encourage more OU academics to engage with new technologies as part of their everyday practice (ie, not just for teaching purposes). I'm concentrating on blogging because I think it has a reasonable tradition (in the new definition of tradition which means anything older than 2 years) and is probably the most fruitful for academics. Most of my arguments will apply to the other technologies also, and I think you can use blogs as a springboard for a host of web 2.0 stuff.

Anyway, following on from my previous post I wanted to set out the motivations for educators to take up blogging. Here's what I've come up with so far, there is a bit of overlap between them:

• The economics of reputation – increasingly one’s reputation online is seen as a valuable commodity. This is partly because a good reputation is difficult to establish and also because in an environment where content is free and widely available then quality becomes a differentiating factor.
• Engagement with your subject area – in many subject areas the blogosphere is where much of the informed and detailed debate is occurring. If this is the case in your subject area then not to be part of it limits your expertise in the same manner as not publishing journal articles (perhaps even more so). If your subject area is not one widely engaged with blogging then this represents a good opportunity to establish yourself as one of the lead experts.
• Increased reflection – keeping a regular blog seems to encourage a degree of reflection and critical analysis as you comment on conferences, workshops, research, etc.
• Personal status and payback – being a recognised blogger in any field is likely to raise your profile and thus lead to increased requests for participation in projects, key note speeches, consultancy, invited papers, etc.
• Organisational status – as an institution the OU is not as prominent in the blogosphere as it should be. While company blogs tend to be rather bland, there is a positive image and potentially student recruitment effect for the institution if there are known to be a number of good bloggers in residence.
• Link to teaching – the type of content used in courses is increasingly diverse, and one model for including up to date information is to have feeds from a number of blogs incorporated in to teaching material.
• Eating our own dog food - increasingly students are encouraged to use blogs in courses, and so we should be demonstrating how they can be effective.

In a comment on my previous post Scott Leslie makes the good point that by being a blogger you build up a network of contacts, from people linking or commenting on your posts, plus the blogs you read and link to, which is invaluable in overcoming problems. Doug Clow also suggests that he had come to the stage where he couldn't do his job without blogging now.

Now, I know lots of people have blogged about this and must have run similar projects in their own universities, so I'd really appreciate any links or suggestions for further benefits for academics. It would also be kind of neat to say in the report that some of this report was produced through the benefits of blogging, demonstrating Scott's point.

Is blogging a good use of time?

Tony Karrer has been prompted by a couple of posts to consider whether use of web 2.0 technologies is viewed as wasting time by others. He asks:

Do people have enough time to use these tools? If so, does that mean that they are somehow not the people who are already "too busy" at their jobs? Are the only people who will use the tools exactly those people who the organization views as time wasters, tinkering about, etc.

Although he's talking about web 2.o technologies, I'll narrow it down to just blogging for some consideration. I have some sympathy with the people who think it is only for those with too much time on their hands, because I used to think the same.  Something along the lines of 'oh yes, it's fine for them to spend their whole day blogging, but I'm actually busy writing a course.' And I do still wonder how some people who have ten posts a day find time to do anything else. But of course I've come round in my thinking, even if I'm not the most prolific blogger on Technorati.

So, if you do think blogging is a waste of time, or you don't have enough time, let me try and convince you otherwise. Firstly, you should be prepared to put in some initial bootstrapping effort. Your blog won't be widely read overnight (if ever), and the paybacks I'm about to list need some critical mass of postings I think. It helps if you've got a project to specifically link to so you have some momentum behind it. For instance I was writing my VLE book when I started mine so I had lots of stuff in my head to get out.  There are lots of benefits in terms of reputation, marketing yourself, indirect payment (e.g. through consultancy) etc, but here I'm just going to concentrate on the ones relating to time.

i) You can direct people to your blog and save having to produce reports or documents. I often get in to conversations with people and they ask me to summarise things in an email and I simply send them to my blog, maybe with a specific tag e.g. 'look at the stuff I've written under the VLE tag'. It is probably still some way off, but in the future I would like to think that instead of producing a CV and letter of application for a job you could just send someone to your blog. That should give them a much better indication of whether they want to employ you.

ii) When you get in the habit it speeds up the process of recording your thoughts on events. I often sit in conferences or workshops thinking about the blog posting I will do (or sometimes actually doing it). This saves me having to write up notes afterwards and also helps me focus on what is important.

iii) It provides an easy dissemination point. For example I usually  put up my powerpoint on Slideshare and link it in my blog. A lot of people know this, so if they have missed a talk or want the slides from a talk they don't bother emailing me, they simply go to the blog.

iv) For the organisation it provides a knowledge transfer route. Now I'm not suggesting we do away with all workshops (biscuit suppliers need not fear for their trade), but an organisation that has a good set of regular bloggers has an efficient means of knowledge sharing which might be time consuming to realise in other ways.

So that's my reasons for how it repays the time spent on it, and that's not considering all the other benefits. I'm off to read my blog roll now...

OU Learning Design workshops

I ran four workshops this week for the OU Learning Design project. My colleague Grainne Conole had prepared the slides and done four the previous week, so I can't take any credit for the sessions being well structured. We have been using the Compendium tool develop by KMI as a means of eliciting and representing learning designs. We added in an LD icon set, with icons for activity, task, role, VLE tool, resource, output and assignment.

We got attendees to play with this tool, and I was surprised at how well received it was. There is always a danger when giving people a prototype tool that they get mired in small usability details and the bigger picture gets lost. But the reverse happened and people really got the point of a learning design approach by playing with the tool.

Here are some of the general responses from the workshops:

• Using the tool helped generate discussion and get consensus.
• It helped surface hidden complexity in some activities.
• It made users consider the whole range of support, tools and assets.
• It suggested using new technologies to some people.

There was general support for the project, and our next step is to build up the knowledge base, so that we can bridge the gap between pedagogy and technology. We have lots of case studies that we're going to populate it with.