The Ed Techie

Digital literacies

I was asked to provide some thoughts on digital literacies for the Vice Chancellor, but rather than just do a dead email, in keeping with the spirit of the topic, I thought I'd put them in a blog post.

This isn't the research related view, but rather a personal perspective. Here are what I think are interesting about what we might term new digital literacies:

• Different voices - think of the bloggers you read the most. It might be people like Stephen Downes, David Warlick, Will Richardson, D'Arcy Norman, Alan Levine, Scott Leslie, Tony Hirst, etc. Now consider the top-cited researchers in educational technology journals. I'm not sure who they are, but my guess is it probably won't bear much resemblance to your top blog list. There are a few exceptions (Grainne Conole, Terry Anderson come to mind), but generally I think blogs have allowed people to find a different voice, and that has allowed very good writers who perhaps didn't find the academic journal an appropriate publishing outlet to have a voice.
• Reuse as an artform - Steve Jobs is fond of quoting Picasso's "Good artists borrow, great artists steal". The same might be said for new digital literacies "good educators borrow, great educators mashup". Taking existing material be it content, data, tools, and remixing it isn't just a shortcut or convenience, it is an independent skill of its own.
• Becoming a broadcaster - educators need to re-envisage themselves as broad-(or narrow)-casters. A lecture is a form of broadcast. You now just have many alternatives. Creating videos on your PC is, if not simple, at least achievable. Creating podcasts is a doddle. You can blog, slidecast, webcast, or hold forth in SecondLife. These are considerable skills to acquire, see for example the videos of Michael Wesch for how good they can be. Also, if you have the time watch all of Wesch's hour long lecture on a portal to media literacy to appreciate how the new digital literacies are not just nice add-ons but essential if we are to get students to participate in education.
• Multiple outlets - an additional point to the above, you now have many different possible outlets for your material, and often for the same material. A paper may appear in the conference proceedings, on your blog,on slideshare, scribd, etc. There are multiple ways of finding an audience.
• Social motivation - why do all this? Partly it's for the creative itch, we like to express ourselves, but more prominent in the digital literacies is the social motivation. If you post something you may get comments back, which may start a dialogue, which may lead to the expansion of your network.
• New metrics - I have talked a lot about this in the past, and I still don't know what the answer is. As I've often said, I don't want technorati to replace my RAE rating because it would end up influencing behaviour. But I do know that many of the traditional metrics we apply in higher education (e.g. publishing in 'quality journals' whatever they are), are simply irrelevant to understanding digital literacies.
• Openness as a starting point - following up from my previous post, part of acquiring digital literacies is about a mindset also. One of the cornerstones of this is that you start out with openness as a default - it may not always be appropriate, but it's where you start from. That way reuse, conversation and your own literacy develop.

The eduWomble manifesto

For those who have difficulties with the connotations of edupunk, straight of Wales we bring you - eduWomble! One of my twitter friends Griffithss4 tweeted yesterday that regarding their learning environment

"Current approach can be summarised (and will be referred to) as the #'Womble Strategy"

For those outside the UK, the Wombles was a children's television programme set on Wimbledon Common about creatures who lived underground and made their homes and stuff by recycling the rubbish humans left around. The green message was very ahead of its time, but it's the theme tune that offers itself up to us educational technologists as metaphor.

The main theme is represented in the lyrics by "Making good use of the things that we find/Things that the everyday folks leave behind." For the modern educational technologist this means using non-educational applications in educational settings. It also applies to content - as I argued in the YouTube annotations post, what commentary allows you to do is to take any resource and make it an educational one, and what digital content allows you to do is find and locate any resource. So an average photo becomes part of a digital storytelling class, a clip from a 50s TV series part of a commentary on changing architectural styles, a Sex Pistols track a theme tune for RSS, and so on. We're making good use of the things people leave behind.

A second theme is that of the loosely coupled nature of the educational technologist. Obviously this applies to our use of applications, but also our network. We all belong to different types of network (e.g. I sort of belong to networks such as 'The OU', 'The OU plus associated people', 'UK edubloggers', 'The Canadian/US eduglu affiliation', etc). These are bottom up, but still highly effective networks. Here the lyrics do the Clay Shirky by stating " Wombles are organized, work as a team."

Another theme is that of change management by stealth. Here the lyrics remind us that " People don't notice us, they never see/Under their noses a Womble may be." And furthermore that " We're so incredibly, utterly devious/Making the most of everything". This sounds like Injenuity in Viral Professional Development mode.

And just to reiterate the reuse, mashup agenda the lyrics end with " Pick up the pieces and make them into something new/Is what we do!". Surely written with Tony in mind?

Recently David Wiley asked if we should have something akin to a carbon footprint for education, which calculated how much you reused material. The status one should aspire to is eduWomble.

Here are the lyrics in full:

Underground, Overground, Wombling Free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we.
Making good use of the things that we find,
Things that the everyday folks leave behind.

Uncle Bulgaria,
He can remember the days when he wasn't behind The Times,
With his map of the World.
Pick up the papers and take them to Tobermory!

Wombles are organized, work as a team.
Wombles are tidy and Wombles are clean.
Underground, Overground, wombling free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we!

People don't notice us, they never see,
Under their noses a Womble may be.
We womble by night and we womble by day,
Looking for litter to trundle away.

We're so incredibly, utterly devious
Making the most of everything.
Even bottles and tins.
Pick up the pieces and make them into something new,
Is what we do!

Technology as metaphor (or I'm on e-Literate)

I was really pleased to be asked to contribute an article to the edition of On The Horizon that Michael Feldstein is editing. As part of the procedure all the authors are writing a guest blog post on e-Literate. It feels kind of like getting the opening slot on the Parkinson show (US readers - substitute with Leno).

My piece is up now, called SocialLearn: Bridging the Gap Between Higher Education and Web 2 (surprise choice of topic, I know!). As well as talking about SocialLearn I wanted to make the argument that the technology we (individuals and institutions) use is a metaphor, or at least an artefact, for how we engage with the social issues. My argument then is that the conventional LMS is the wrong metaphor, not just the wrong technology, for engaging with some of the changes we are seeing that we might cluster under the web 2.0 banner. I am in the position of being able to quote myself, so I'll let M Weller sum it up:

I would suggest that the reason the centralised LMS is not the answer to the ‘web 2.0 problem’ for education is because in its software DNA it embodies the wrong metaphor. It seeks to realise the principles of hierarchy, control and centralisation – the traditional classroom made virtual. This approach won’t help educators understand the new challenges and opportunities they are now facing.

When is a creepy treehouse a community of practice?

Chris Lott coined the term 'creepy treehouse', and John Krutsch defines it as "a place online that adults built with the intention of luring kids in." Jared Stein has an excellent post on defining a creepy treehouse further:

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.

n. Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

n. A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.

None of these commentators is suggesting that we shouldn't exploit new technologies for learning, but rather warning of the way in which you do it, to avoid Creepy Treehouse Syndrome.

I think it's an excellent term, but I have a couple of reservations about it. Firstly, it could be used as a justification for not engaging with any social networking tools in education. You can imagine someone saying 'I've heard students think you're building some kind of creepy treehouse if you go near that stuff. What they want from us is distance, authority and lectures.'

Secondly, it suggests that all learners are young (I know that is explicit in the definition  of luring kids in, but it could be extended to all uses of social networking in education). In the States and many other countries the number of higher education students older than the traditional 18-22 year old range now exceeds those in that range. There may well be different needs and different uses of technology for the adult learner. They don't see it as a creepy treehouse, or even a happy playground, because those are not meaningful metaphors. These are people more concerned with a peer or a professional network.

For instance, I asked all my post-grad students to sign up for Twitter. Some have stuck with it, some haven't, but for me it has changed the dynamics of that educator/student relationship and made it more peer like. I was pleased to see that one of my students, Manish, is now doing the same with his students. I don't see anything creepy about this (of course, the students may disagree!), because of the different nature of learners involved.

Web 2.0 - even if we're wrong, we're right

Brian Kelly has a good slidecast talking about exploiting the social aspects of web 2.0.  He gave a similar talk with the title 'Web 2.0 - what if we're wrong?' and in Twitter I tried to argue that even if we're wrong, we're right, but struggled with the 140 character limit, so I'll put my argument here.

Brian makes a good case about avoiding the Gartner Hype Curve where you have rising expectations, which are not met, and then a trough of despair (I can't embed the actual slide direct, but it's slide 19). He is right about this, and the possible risks. Many web 2.0 companies don't have a sustainable business model, and there is undoubtedly some hype amongst all of this. Brian gives a good account of how these risks can be overcome without retreating from the brave new world. His angle is from IT services, but I want to broaden out his argument.

Just as with the initial dot com bubble, the fact that there is hype doesn't mean that the overall direction isn't correct. It may not completely change the world in the next 18 months, but it will significantly change the world in the next 5 years. Ewan McIntosh digs up a great quote from Clifford Stoll in 1995 saying (amongst much pooh-poohing of this internet stuff):

"Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping - just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?”

Few would doubt we do all of those things online now, and much more. So even if the e-commerce enthusiasts were wrong about the speed and extent of change back then, they were more right than Stoll was in dismissing it.

And that's the case with social networking, web 2.0, user generated content, liberation of content, etc. Even if it doesn't turn out as some enthusiasts predict there is one key point that the detractors always miss - it will never go back to how it was. After wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, iTunes, etc the idea that consumers of newspapers, books, music, television, and yes, education, will realise it was all just a silly mistake and go back to how it was may be what the industry leaders dream of, but is unlikely, to say the least.

Which brings me on to my even if we're wrong, we're right argument. Sure things won't be the utopian vision of free services, open education and democratisation that some talk of, but whatever comes after the current trends will build on top of them. Just as web 2.0 built on what had happened in the first wave of web development. And the people who got it, the founders and the visionaries weren't people who had dismissed the web and insisted it would go away. They were people who engaged with it, and could see how to take it forward. So, whatever comes after web 2.0 (don't say web 3.0), the people best placed to understand it and adapt to it will be those who have immersed themselves in the current technological climate, and not those who have sat waiting for it to fail so they can say 'told you so.'

Moving from being a provider to a meaner

Question: What have librarians, IT services and academics got in common (apart from occassionally questionable dress sense)?

Answer: All have one key element of their role undermined or removed by the web, which can be loosely described as provision of content or service.

Back around 1999 when the likes of David Noble were bemoaning that the internet would make academics redundant (he was the Andrew Keen of his day), us e-learning advocates would argue that merely providing content is not all that educators did. Which led to the oft-quoted move from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side.

Librarians have also faced a similar challenge from the internet. When everything is available and Google can find you it, what is the role of the library or the librarian? Part of their function was to store, organise and then help us find physical resources. This changes fundamentally when things become digital. For a start, the idea that librarians need to decide which one, and only one, category a book can go in, seems absurd in an Amazon world. It just isn't a task we require someone to do on our behalf anymore.

Then last week Brian Kelly posted his talk about IT services and web 2.0. I posted a comment about my recent Google conversion, claiming the type of tools I could get was an order of magnitude better externally. Andy Powell has a post about social networks and IT services, stating:

So what is the lesson here for institutions and institutional IT services? I think they need to take note.  Whilst (in some cases) they may have the technical competence to build global-social social services, it is not typically part of their function to do so.  To put it bluntly, their business is to serve the institution, not to serve the world.  As a result, IT services have to begin seeing themselves as the enablers rather than the providers of such services.

I think Andy hits the nail on the head here. This is actually the same solution for all three groups mentioned here. There are two basic rules we should follow here:

1) In a world where content and technologies are free don't fight against them - you cannot compete as the sole  provider.

2) Such a world is disaggregated, and complex. Therefore there is a need to help users with the skill set in combining these disaggregated components into a meaningful whole, be that a PLE (if you're IT services), a set of resources (if you're a librarian), or a course (if you're an educator).

So we are less providers now, more frameworkers. We need a new term for this - I propose the term my daughter uses for anyone who is less than generous to her - a 'meaner', since our role is to help add meaning to disparate components. Meaners of the world unite!

Top widgets (or why Google runs the world)

(charlessc - http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesc/100343106/)

My favourite search tool, Lijit, has a feature on the top widgets. The top two by quite some distance are Google Analytics and Google Syndication (AdSense). Surprisingly mybloglog is third (well above Technorati and Twitter).

The post also breaks them down by type, with 'metrics' being the most common type of widget people add. They also show the most popular tools within each category, and it's here you really see the dominance of Google. In the Analytics category Google Analytics scores 39.9% compared with Sitemeter in second place with 16.2%. In Ads, Adsense has a whopping 84.8% share of the market, and in video, YouTube unsurprisingly sweeps the board with 86.6%.

One rather ironic, and thus sweet result - Google comes third in Search (behind Snap and Lijit).

Still it shows one thing - all that twenty percent time is paying off for Google.

What would Russell make of it?

John recently posted about Bertrand Russell and his essay 'In Praise of Idleness'. When I was a student this was one of my favourite books, largely because I was idle and was trying to justify it (and you've got to admire someone who smokes such a pipe). I have been thinking about this a lot recently (sadly, this is true, this is what I think about), and considering what Russell would make of modern day Britain or the global society.

He puts several arguments forward in the essay, the first being that work (which was physical work then), was a tool for governments. The second is that leisure is a good thing, and that

"The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief."

He criticises the uneven distribution of labour:

We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labour by making the others overwork.

With an even distribution he argues that everyone will have time for leisure, leading to some kind of artistic utopia:

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be.

So what would Russell make of us now? I think he would be simultaneously overjoyed and dismayed. Undoubtedly we have more leisure time than we did in 1932, and this is fairly well distributed (although sadly the 4-hour working day hasn't caught on). With labour saving devices and a convenience lifestyle as well as more holidays and shorter working hours there is a good deal of leisure time for the average person compared to the time of Russell. But what do we do with it? Is it the great explosion of artistic endeavour and creation that Russell predicted?

Yes and No. Russell would I think be shocked to see that when given leisure time a lot of us spend it slumped in front of the TV drinking Pinot Grigio and watching other people on reality shows. But, the whole 2.0, user generated content world would delight him I think. For his painter who wants to paint without starving read Photographer who shares with the world via Flickr. And then there are all the bloggers, wiki writers, YouTube creators, podcasters who create material of mind-bendingly variable quality, but they are engaged in being creative, and that is fulfilling. So the next time someone bemoans the quality or self-indulgence of user generated content, quote Russell at them:

Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

Social networks - the definition thing

During the recent Economist debate on social networks, danah boyd pointed out that people were including lots of examples that weren't social networks. She suggested that we define our terms rigorously. While she's right that it's difficult to have a debate if we're actually talking about different things, this getting bogged down in definition is a habit that bedevils academic discourse to the point where we spend all our time debating what it is we will be debating.

Quick joke: How many academics does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: What do you mean exactly by an academic? And in what context are you using change? What type of lightbulb are we referring to?

In at least two subject areas I've contributed to over the past few years - learning environments and learning objects - the definition thing rumbled on endlessly. Every paper began with a look at definitions and then their own, and then a justification.

The problem is Wittgenstein's - as he pointed out any attempt to define the term 'game' is flawed since you can always find examples that do not fit the exact definition. As he argued we manage perfectly well to function without an exact definition of a game. What we have are (Jungian) archetypes - idealized representations of a concept, which individual instances can be nearer to or further from. There is thus a degree of membership. In our example, you would say Facebook is close to the archetype of a social network, but a wiki community less so.

I think this is a more pragmatic approach because any exact definition you come up with will exclude examples that are still of interest. Think of it as fuzzy logic and set theory - there is no strict cut off for when someone is tall, but some people are definitely tall (a value of 1), some are definitely not (a value of 0), while others are inbetween and it will depend on the judge and the context (a value between 1 and 0).

Put less pretentiously - if it looks like a social network, acts like a social network and if Scoble's on it, then it is a social network.

Disaggregated communication

I was chatting with Tony Hirst the other day and we were reflecting on how varied our communication methods were amongst the Facebook project team (Tony, Stuart Brown, Liam Green-Hughes and me). We sometimes use Facebook itself to have a discussion, or we might have an email exchange. I can't really see any reason for why we use one instead of the other at any particular time, but these tend to be discussions along the lines of 'have you seen this?'

Then there are our blog posts and related comments. Sometimes we will respond to each other's posts in our own blogs, other times we will add a comment, but mostly this type of communication is more ambient - I know what Tony is thinking about or working on, and just as importantly, he knows that I know it, so when we meet we have a shared foundation for conversation.

And then we have twitter - we all follow each other, and so will sometimes send replies or direct messages, but as with blogging Twitter really provides a background to more focused discussion. I will know what they are working on, but also it helps maintain a social bond which is vital in an informal team such as this.

Occasionally we need synchronous interaction, and will use Flashmeeting or Skype.

Lastly, we meet up for beers and cross paths at workshops and occasional meetings.

I've put all this is a compendium mindmap, shown above. It gets more social as you move from work meetings anti-clockwise round to the beer. So, at least from the point of view of this grouping, face to face is both the least and the most socially oriented.

What Tony and I realised was that we didn't really register that we had all these methods of communication. Using them and maintaining an overall track of the dialogue is not difficult, it just feels natural. The reason this may be relevant is that in education we worry an awful lot about communication channels with students and having only one main method. Perhaps this disaggregation of communication is not as difficult to manage cognitively as we once thought and actually allows each medium/tool to be used to its best advantage. This only happens if you're comfortable with the technology though.