The Ed Techie

The Christmas Twitter Game

I'm a (not very good) runner, and one of the discussions that often comes up this time of year is whether you will go for a run on Christmas day. The responses tend to fall into 5 categories:

1. Of course, it's just another day and I've got to stick to my training schedule.
2. It's great to get some exercise in before all that indulgence.
3. No, it's kind of showing off, declaring 'look how committed I am, I run on Christmas day'
4. Yes, I like to show off and declare 'look how committed I am, I run on Christmas day'
5. I'd like to but I'm too hung over from Christmas Eve

If we replace running with twittering (or Facebooking or blogging if you prefer), then we have an ed tech equivalent. I wonder who will be up on Christmas day posting tweets such as 'opening a bad jumper from my parents' or 'eating a fifth mince pie'. I'm declaring now that I'm out - no tweets from me on Christmas day.

The Christmas Twitter Game - I'm compiling a secret list of people who I think will twitter on the day itself, and come boxing day I'm going to score my predictive powers. Hey it beats watching the Wizard of Oz on TV again.   

Shaming yourself in to action

I like this: in an attempt to shame himself into losing weight, Kerry Buckley has a Big Visible Belly graph showing on his blog, which shows his fluctuation around his ideal weight - over and it records in red and under it shows in green.

This use of the blog to expose some aspect of yourself to the audience and thus force action got me thinking. What else could you use it for? I would probably like to record my running, with a weekly target. But anything you procrastinate over would be a contender - you could go for study hours, progress through Remembrance of Things Past, number of alcohol units consumed (depending on whether you wanted to drink more or less), blog posts even.

I think the visual element is important - you get an instant nudge if it's largely red. So is the pressure from the audience - this only needs to be perceived, none of your audience actually needs to care or comment, but the fact that it is public is sufficient. Another Facebook app maybe?

Road to Beijing

This is interesting (if you like running). Alexander Vero was a reasonable amateur marathon runner, but has set himself the target of qualifying for the next Olympics. He is a documentary maker, so his aim is to show just how tough it is. He knows he probably won't achieve it, but wants to document the effort it takes to get close. As a not very good runner, I find it inspiring, but what has been interesting is the criticism he has received from elite athletes. Far from underestimating the challenge or thinking anyone can do it, what he is illustrating is how hard you have to train and also the limits of natural ability. I don't know why elite athletes would find this insulting. He has even suffered the worse term of abuse for a runner and been called a 'jogger.' Ouch. Anyway, worth tracking his progress, he is aiming for 2hrs 30mins in the Paris marathon.

Running, VLEs, e-learning and democratisation

Warning - this post is a desperate attempt to combine all my interests in one posting.

I took part in my first half-marathon on Sunday (Cardiff, naturally). Like many runners I have come to it relatively late in life (I started last year in earnest). One of the many things I like about running is its very democratic nature. It really is a sport for everyone. All you need is a pair of trainers (in theory that is, I also find an ipod, GPS tracker and hi tech fabrics essential also, so I resemble some form of cyborg, but these are really just luxuries). It encompasses all manner of ability, ages, backgrounds and motivations.

It struck me that this notion of democratisation is something of an underlying theme in my interests, almost by accident. I work at the Open University, the aim of which was to democratise higher education. I was part of the team responsible for the OU course,  T171 You your computer and the Net in 1999, which had around 15,000 students and arguably did a lot to open up understanding of the internet. Next week I am giving a keynote in Barcelona entitled 'VLEs and the democratisation of e-learning', in which I will argue that although VLEs are  not the most exciting or innovative technology around, they have done a lot to democratise e-learning for many academics, in the same way that Microsoft products are often not the best, but the end-result is that they have brought computing to a much wider audience.

However, I think I am guilty of a lazy shorthand here, whereby I drop the word 'democratisation', with the assumption that it is necessarily  a good thing. This is not so - one could view terrorism for example as the democratisation of warfare. Some things are not, or should not, be susceptible to democratisation - talent is a good example. The plethora of reality TV shows (such as X-Factor, Pop Idol, Big Brother etc) can be presented as a democratisation of talent, or celebrity. But they rarely produce anything of quality. Talent, is by its nature, exclusive and undemocratic.