The Ed Techie

Academici.net

I guess it was a result of my post about an academic LinkedIn, I got invited to join Academici.net. It seems to be what I was talking about (I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't know about it), so I created a profile. While it is definitely more academic focused than LinkedIn, I still felt that it was a bit oriented towards getting a new job, and not so much around creating joint research proposals, or collaborative articles, or visiting fellowships, say.

It has a good feature set - to quote from the email:

An on-line journal to publish abstracts, drafts, papers or upload any kind of documents and the option to share them with contacts or keep them private through your privacy settings.

The ability to add your own personal bookmarks and share them with your contacts!

The ability to participate on the message boards plus your own private message board.

A personalized central message board to follow your favorite conversations across the network.

A tribute section - a support for the next career move.

Easy search functionality to quickly find people with similar interests or backgrounds.

However I felt there could be a bit more 2.0 in there, it could be a bit, well, cooler. Take a look at the Nike+ site for instance (for creating a runner's profile using the Nike+ iTunes combination). It has very good personal tools (you upload all your runs, it gives you analysis, playlists, so on). But it also has good community tools, for instance you can set a goal such as 'Run 100 miles' and others can join that goal, a la 43Things. Academici.net could do with a bit of this, e.g. 'I'm interested in creating a Framework 7 proposal on web 2.0 technologies'. You can kind of do this in the forums, but I think it could be made more accessible - the forums approach feels a bit old school VLE.

What BB's patent really tells you about them

I gave the keynote at the BB users’ conference yesterday in Durham. As I have blogged before I had some reservations about this. I think it was worthwhile though – I talked about web 2.0 and some of the usual VLE topics I have covered (succession, metaphors, future directions, etc). From a BB audience perspective the key slide was one that focused on the patent where I played the YouTube movie on software patents, gave some of Michael Feldstein’s interpretations of the patent, and linked it back to the succession model. The Blackboard company representatives in the audience looked a little unhappy with this, although slightly battle weary too – I suspect they are getting tired of talking about it. In the questions someone asked me about other patents and I outlined some of their dangers and why I considered them an ‘educational menace’. So, it was a good audience to raise that topic in (in many ways better than preaching to the converted at an open source conference, say). I think it is also another example of why it is such a dumb move on BB’s part. Without the patent I wouldn’t have said anything bad about them, I had a lot of time for them. What the patent does is effectively polarise users, forcing them in to mutually opposing camps. It has made me much more of an advocate of open source for example, and that reaction manifested across many HE institutions will ultimately do a good deal of harm to BB. If I was an investor in BB I would be seriously questioning the wisdom of Michael Chasen, its CEO, in pursuing this strategy.

The theme of the conference was the power of 2.0, and was all about web 2.0 implications. One can’t imagine a less 2.0 approach than BB’s patent (it hardly chimes with the principles of openness, freedom and respect for users does it), so the other thing is demonstrates is a complete lack of understanding about the current technological and social zeitgeist – and would you want to place so much of your institution’s strategy in the hands of a company that is so far from getting it?

A dash of 2.0

I was up in London yesterday visiting Diana Laurillard to talk about their Pedagogic Planner project (which is part of the JISC D4L programme along with our own D4LD project). I was quite impressed with what they've done. They've taken a pragmatic approach which allows users to define a course using some of the standard data (e.g. learning outcomes, number of hours, etc), and then added a layer of pedagogic planning to this that builds on Diana's conversational framework (although it could be any approach and is likely to be extended). They have framed it around a number of questions learners want answers for and then matched these with exemplars. The next step is to represent these as LAMS sequences.

I could see how we in the OU might take such a tool and rebadge it, so the labels were much more specific (and thus meaningful) to our practice.

But all the way through I kept seeing opportunities for a bit more "2.0" in there. I think this will come, and they are seeding the database at the moment, but it struck me that I have become something of a monomaniac about this now. I remember someone saying they were a fan of Tabasco and they found it impossible to eat any meal without thinking what it would be like with a dash of the hot stuff. I find the same with 2.0 - and not just to do with technology. I have recently suggested an open, 2.0 solution to managerial styles, an evening out and children's entertainment. I now admit that web 2.0 doesn't have anything to do with these really. But even so, I can't stop looking at something and thinking, 'what would a dash of 2.0 do to it?'

RSS as universal acid

My colleague Tony Hirst has been exploring the use of RSS to deliver regular (academic) content, using FeedCycle. There's nothing particularly revolutionary about this, but Tony has been exploring these issues for a while, and it seems like the content and the technology side are converging to give him what he wants.

I'm always impressed when something relatively simple like RSS that was developed for one purpose begins to have new found applications. There are some quite subtle implications to Tony's delivery of content - for a start it allows the user to control the pace. It also provides an easy means of syndicating content, which rather reduces the concept of content coming from your university. One could imagine the same content being delivered to students at different universities, and on different courses. While this may not lead to full scale disintermediation (there I go again), it is another erosion (whether you view that as good or bad) in the direct link between student A and University B.

At the EDEN conference I showed netvibes as an example of web 2.0 stuff and Stephen Downes said it looked like the Netscape portal of 10 years ago. He asked why this would be any different. I mumbled a reply which didn't answer the question, but on reflection perhaps what I should have said was 'RSS', or maybe 'RSS and AJAX'. It isn't that the concept is different, but the environment it is operating in is - now there is a wealth of content and tools that can be pulled in easily, which makes the point of a portal worthwhile.

There - it's only taken me 6 weeks to come up with that response. Tomorrow: a witty putdown to a bloke I met on London underground in 1997...

PS - apologies for borrowing Dan Dennett's Universal acid metaphor yet again. I have previously suggested that service oriented architectures were a universal acid, and now RSS. None of these come close to the penetration of Dennett's acid though - evolution.

Web 2.0 resources on Slideshare

In a medium is the message sort of example -  Brian Kelly has gathered together some good web 2.0 presentations on Slideshare (Scott Wilson's one was particularly insightful I thought).

Thanks to Tony Hirst for sending me this.