The Ed Techie

Celebrity twitter doesn't matter

In the UK in particular, Twitter has gone mainstream over the past few weeks. This has largely been due to Jonathan Ross (@wossy) and Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) both becoming keen users and discussing it on Ross's chat show. Radio 1's Chris Moyles (@obnoxious - oh, ok @chrisdjmoyles) has also been recruiting a new wave of followers. This meant every chat show, news station, newspaper and opinion writer has been talking about Twitter.

This means we've had a raft of pieces along the lines of 'I don't know why people would want to tell everyone what they had for lunch'. Sigh. Technology seems to be the only subject area where the journalist can display their ignorance as a kind of credential: 'You can trust my opinion because I have never tried this.' I would like to see the same principle applied to film reviews: 'I haven't seen The Reader, but....'

Anyway, that's as it's always been. Personally I've never got the whole celebrity thing, so them coming on to twitter doesn't bother me. Yes, I'm not even sure I like Stephen Fry particularly. Obviously there's nothing wrong with it, although I did briefly experience that feeling familiar to a teenager who has been following an indie band and finds they suddenly become popular. Just as print can give us Proust and OK magazine, so Twitter can handle a range of communication uses.

My beef with the celebritisation (that's not a word is it?) of Twitter is twofold: Firstly, I think if you're signing up for twitter to follow celebrities, you'll miss the point of it. A conversation with a celebrity is not a normal conversation. It is unequal, and this skews the conversation. But if that's what people want from their use of it, that's fine.

My second reservation relates more to the way the news, and society in general legitimises something. It doesn't matter if hundreds of thousands of people use something and find it useful, until a celebrity uses it, and this legitimises it. There is now something for journalists to hang their report off. This is just lazy as it means they don't have to actually investigate it - they can report around the subject.

A similar effect occurs with business - any technology is seen as frivolous until some 'gurus' start telling companies how they can make money from it. And then it becomes serious.

Here's the truth: YOU legitimise technology. Celebrities and business are a side-show.

The Twitter dilemma for organisations

I, like many others, have in the past voiced the opinion that Twitter needs to have groups or filters so you can selectively send messages rather than lump everyone in together. I'm not so sure now, 'lumping' is what Twitter does best, it creates a big old organic soup of social chat, half caught conversations, professional debate, links, tips, cries for help, rambling thoughts, news updates, and plain old nonsense. From this organic soup something wonderful evolves - if you are your network then your Twitter stream is the phenotype of that network.

The danger of the grouping line of development is that it goes something like this:

• Let's have groups.
• Let's put them 'inside' different containers so that people can easily differentiate them
• Let's add in some threading so we can follow conversations more easily
• Let's group them around subjects.

Sounds familiar? Yes, it's 1998 and we have reinvented bulletin boards.

But, as Twitter goes mainstream people are facing problems. Individuals such as Stephen Pope has decided to split his Twitter identity in two to allow for professional chat and smaller scale social chat.  As it mainstreams more organisations are also having ids. My colleague Stuart Brown set up the @openuniversity account some time ago, and as he explains he wasn't sure what to do with it. He used it mainly for broadcasting news (yes, we all knew when Coast would be on next), but has started to engage in conversation more recently. This has had a positive effect on the number of followers and interaction, but it gets us into tricky areas. Most universities have set up detailed systems for dealing with student queries, so the right person can answer the right question. The danger is that as more students get onto Twitter they'll start using the openuniversity account as a catch-all. Stuart's smart but he isn't going to be able to cope with queries about software set-up, assessment deadline extensions, strength of covalent bonds, obtaining financial support, missing course materials, etc.

Of course he will respond appropriately if he gets such queries, pointing people in the right direction, but a) being the full-time Open University Twitter responder isn't his job and b) this isn't the best medium. I am imagining the conversation where I say to our head of communications, 'hey let's forget expensive Customer Relations Management software, I've got this cool tool where we'll just have one id for everything. Oh, and you can only use 140 characters.'

But, here is the Twitter dilemma (or any social media) - if students are using it then having a presence is important because any avenue of conversation and support is worthwhile. So how do you manage that dialogue without having the sort of terms and conditions that seem inappropriate in an informal discussion space?

Hey, don't look at me, I don't know.

Reflection on flash debate in twitter

Last Friday I attempted a 'Flash debate' in twitter. The idea was that, like Flash mobs, we'd come together via twitter to discuss a particular topic, in this case virality in education. In my previous post I drew some conclusions about the topic, but here are some thoughts on the process.

Overall, I'd say it had only middling success, you can see some of the conversations here. Although the inputs I had were good (and thankyou to those who contributed), it didn't really take off. In short, my debate around virality didn't go viral. My aim in attempting this, and indeed the whole YOFL thing, is to explore what ways of using new tools work for educators. There are several factors to consider in the Twitter debate example:

i) Topic - maybe 'virality in education' isn't that exciting, or more probably, what a debate needs is a straightforward opening question, whereas this was a bit unfocused.

ii) Timing - Fridays may not be the best day of the week, and I did most of it during the working day in the UK. This may make it difficult to catch on in other time zones.

iii) Medium - it could be that maybe twitter isn't the best medium to conduct this. It has an advantage over setting up a specific forum or wiki in that you may catch people as they go around their daily business, but it has the character limit, poor threading and is limited by the people who follow you.

iv) Initiator - I kicked it off, and it's possible that a) I don't have sufficient cache to make it fly (imagine Downes or Will Richardson doing it) and b) that debates need more than one person driving them along.

I may try another one later on, but probably more focused. Any suggestions on whether it's worth it, or how to improve it are welcome.

Creating virality in education - some thoughts

So, we had the flash debate on twitter about creating virality in education (I'll reflect on the success of that in a separate post). As promised here is some synthesis and thoughts.

What does virality mean?
Inevitably some of the discussion was around what we mean by something being viral. Is it the same as a meme? Does it just mean something that is passed on by 'word of mouth'? Can we define the key characteristics of a viral idea? AJ suggested that one factor was novelty and JoeNicholls suggested that it needed to provide a quick meaningful return on effort.

This return on investment is interesting in virality I think. At it's most basic a viral idea is simply someone forwarding a link or resource - a retweet in Twitter, or passing on a YouTube clip in Facebook. This is potentially useful, but as there is no modification by the transmitter, it is of limited educational use.

Next in terms of engagement we have a blog meme - these usually have a strict format for you to follow, but require content creation by the transmitter within these guidelines.

Lastly, we have an idea that catches on, more of a meme in the Dawkins sense than the formalised blog meme. This is an idea that causes a reaction in people often because it encapsulates a concept neatly. A recent example is Jim Groom's edupunk, which caused a proliferation of blog posts and debate. In this sense the concept is viral, because it spread rapidly within a week, but the spread was caused by the creation of new content, and discussion. It is this type of engagement and reaction that I would propose we want to see in education.

Courtesy of Crappy Graphs, I have tried to summarise this below:

Can it be used in education?
I also pondered the negatives of virality, which for me are that it can come across as a bit desperate (please make my idea go viral), it can be irritating (ie when you get sent urban myths which someone has forwarded by email in the belief they are true), and it can just promote repetition (at the bottom left of my graph). AJ suggested it can be perceived as social, rather than authorative and in education both students and staff place great value on 'authority'. Carmen Tschofen was wary of commandeering virality for education.

I think the wariness arises from invading student space, but also from promoting a form of surface level learning. Can you really teach quantum physics by virality? Well, probably not all of it, but you might get students to think about it by creating a viral idea such as 'if we lived at the quantum level...' (eg 'I could be at home and at school at the same time').

So what?
A possible accusation of all this is that it is a tautology - we have such a loose definition of virality that if something catches on we say 'it went viral'. But, I do feel there is something for educators to look at in this. Why do some YouTube videos catch on and get millions of views? Why do some ideas catch on and create the type of discussion we would love to foster in education.

So my suggestion is that alongside what we do normally, it would be worth attempting to create a viral idea in a course, even if it is to provide light relief and discussion with each other. And the good ones will be shared, and err, go viral.

Twitter Flash debate - inducing virality

Scott dropped me a line the other day saying that, in relation to YOFL, one of the skills he was interested in was 'creating virality'. I think this is exactly the sort of modern digital skill that we should be considering as educators. I'm not sure if this is what Scott meant by it, but I can see at least three reasons why it's interesting as an educator:

1. You want to create the same engagement with learning material for your students, as you see in popular memes or viral ideas.
2. A viral spread of an idea, concept, approach or technology is an excellent way of engaging other academics. Indeed it may be the only way to really address many of the issues of training and staff development, as Jennifer Jones has tried to do with her concept of Viral Professional Development.
3. As a means of engaging your wider network in distributed research, then what you are suggesting needs to have a 'viral' quality.

Of course, all this begets the question 'what do you mean by viral?' I don't want to get bogged down in definitions, but I think in essence it is an idea that people consciously or not, want to spread because it creates some level of engagement.

So, as my first YOFL experiment, here is what I am proposing - on Friday 30th Jan we have a 'flash debate' (you know, like Flash mobs where we all get together at a specified time, but in this case do something interesting and not just have a pillow fight) in Twitter around 'creating virality'. Tag it #YOFL and I should find it. I'll try and summarise it then next week.

(I realise this is all getting a bit recursive - I'm creating a viral activity about creating viral activities - if it doesn't work then that probably answers my question!)

We get the culture minister we deserve

Camus said of Mersault in L'Etranger that he was the 'Christ we deserve'. This phrase has been used many times, usually to indicate that if a society has a problem, then the reasons can be found within the society itself, eg 'we get the Government we deserve.'

In the digital world though, maybe we can reclaim it to mean we really do get the X we deserve and want. This came to mind when Tech journalist Mike Butcher of Techcrunch, 'stole' (or kidnapped, hijacked?) the twitter id of the UK culture minister Andy Burnham. He hasn't stolen anything of course, just claimed that twitter id. He did it part in jest, and part in protest to Burnham's proposal to further regulate web content.

But it set me thinking - we should engage with @andyburnham as if he really was the culture minister we always wanted, ie one who actually understands culture (and they lump in sport as well). So here's my suggestion - follow andyburnham and send him (non-rude, reasonably sensible) suggestions as to what a culture minister should do. That way if the real Andy Burnham ever wants his id he can see what he should be doing.

Oh, and if you're interested the twitter ID tessajowell is still free, if anyone wanted to get us the Olympics we deserve.

[Update, Twitter have suspended the anyburnham account! Booooo!]

A Twitter love song

When I did my talk on Twitter a few weeks back I said it was a love song to Twitter. Last weekend I had some spare time to myself, so what did I do: did I sort out the back garden? Did I finish reading The Alexandria Quartet? Did I go to the gym? No, of course not, I wondered what a Twitter love song would be like, so I spent the time messing about with Camtasia to produce one. And here it is:

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Also available in not so good quality on YouTube

Bush, digital scholarship and the price of reputation

Our Vice Chancellor gave a talk on Digital Scholarship the other day, a topic that is often on my mind (read: trying to legitimise all this messing around I do). Scholarship, or rather ‘having your scholarship recognised’ which is what people really mean, is all about reputation.

In the pre-digital world this reputation could roughly be pegged to other filters. Publication in journals, books, keynote appearances, research grants: all of these require other professionals to have filtered your contribution, so your reputation could easily be established by the quantity, and quality of these measures. Of course, it meant people learnt to game the system – how to get publications out, how to network so you got invited for keynotes, etc., but on the whole it worked reasonably well if you played along.

But the very nature of the digital world is about the removal of the filter. Anyone can blog, produce a video, podcast, and generally express themselves. So, reputation becomes much harder to verify. This is a problem if we want to start rewarding digital scholarship. Put simply, 100 peer reviewed journal articles probably means you are a decent scholar – 100 (or 10,000) blog posts doesn’t mean anything. So we need to find new ways of establishing someone’s online reputation.

Let’s take Tony Hirst as an example. I think we’d all agree Tony would qualify as a digital scholar. So how would we go about demonstrating this? There would be traditional contributions too, such as developing courses, giving talks, involvement in university projects, etc but let’s focus on the online element. Here are some thoughts:

• Quality of output – Tony, or colleagues, could be asked to nominate significant contributions (blog posts, videos, etc). Personally, I've always liked the Feedistan post.
• Appearance on independent rankings – e.g. Technorati, Jane’s 100+ Elearning Professionals to follow on Twitter, or the Wikio UK blog rankings. I take Matt Lingard’s point that, especially with Twitter, these lists don’t really mean much, but if we were trying to establish an overall ranking of reputation, then collectivelythey add some weight.
• Quantity, or variety, of output – maybe being able to show the range of online activity is important, e.g. blog posts, videos, mashups, etc.
• Impact – being able to demonstrate that what you have done has been used by others. For example, Tony’s work with the OpenLearn material inspired Jim Groom and David Wiley to incorporate openlearn units into blogs.
• Testimonials – quotes from others about your work, eg Jim Groom saying “over in Great Britain there is the legendary Open University, rich with an unfair advantage of knowledge and innovation represented by cats like Tony Hirst"

I think any one of these is easy to cheat or game, e.g. by getting into blog wars you can get your technorati rating up, or by publishing very small posts you can increase your quantity, but when taken overall they provide an indication of reputation.

Which brings me on to George W. Bush. Reputation, online or otherwise, is something that it takes a long time to establish, but only a second to destroy. Bush’s failure to twice get the Paulson agreement through congress seems to me less of a failure of the Bill itself (I have no idea if it’s the right approach, and let’s face it, no-one does), but rather a failure of reputation. Put bluntly, the Iraq chickens have come home to roost. Dave Winer first pointed this out, saying:

Flash back to the United Nations on 2/5/03. An impressive almost Presidential Secretary of State, Colin Powell, delivering some chilling news, not coming right out and saying it, but definitely leading you to believe that Saddam has nukes and chemical weapons and stuff even more horrible and is getting ready to use all of it in some unspecified horrible way. .. Well, I did what a lot of Americans did that day, I sucked it up and got behind my government. And they suckered me. And I'll never forget it. I got fooled, and used, and a lot of people died, in the name of freedom, and it was all a lie.

So Bush is suffering from having sacrificed his reputation in order to legitimise the war in Iraq. And if you are going to sacrifice your reputation you had better be sure that a) it’s worth it and b) you aren’t going to need it again.

An awful lot of what us online folks do is not very easily quantifiable. Exactly how does sending a joke message on Twitter contribute to our bottom line? In the long run what we are doing is establishing our own, and by association, our institution’s online reputation. Given Bush’s reputation collapse the next time someone asks you how much is reputation worth you can answer ‘ooh, about $700 billion’.

Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream

I hosted one of the technology coffee mornings at the OpenU (still trying that term) the other day, called "Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream". I talked about my use of twitter, and how we need to think of it as a different type of communication. My conclusion was that 'social is the new substratum'. A prize for anyone who can explain to me what I meant by that...

Here is the slidecast, and you can download the Powerpoint from Slideshare:

Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter microblogging)

Twitter events

The other day I mentioned that I like to Twitter when I'm watching football on TV. My wife doesn't watch, and if I'm not in a pub, it's a way of sharing the experience. Then on Saturday it was the Eurovision Song Contest. I started to watch it, but put a DVD on, then when I looked at Twitter it was awash with Eurovision comments. It struck me that Eurovision was in many ways the perfect Twitter event. It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire to share. And you know that it is a communal event, so others will be watching too.

There's not much broadcasters can do with this, except maybe set up a Twitter id (e.g. Woganesque commentator during Eurovision), but this ability to share the experience online may be the the thing that saves scheduling. Sky Plus and the iPlayer have pretty much destroyed the notion of scheduling, but for programmes and events you want to share, then it has to be done at the allotted time. This obviously applies to live events (sports mainly), but also to any programme people might congregate around. It could be The Apprentice (AJ likes to tweet about this), or Eastenders.

Gapingvoid may have been dismayed by the Brits twittering about Eurovision, but in this respect his talk of social objects is correct. The future of television is not in it being a solitary experience, but in being a social one.

Think of these as 'flash social networks' - Jyri Engestrom argues that "social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.” Around TV we may see these social networks form for the duration of a programme and then dissipate. The key challenge for broadcasters is to facilitate this without stamping all over it, or going creepy treehouse on it.

[Update - Darren Waters had beaten me to it on this]