The Ed Techie

The Economist debate - my 2p worth

As most people have blogged, there is a debate on social networking in higher education over at the Economist. Ewan Macintosh takes the pro side.

For what it's worth here was the comment I posted:

In some ways the argument is irrelevant - it's like asking 'is alcohol beneficial to study?' You could argue either way, but regardless of what we think students are going to use it anyway.

But, that aside, let's look at what SNS offer - a sense of community, peer support, enthusiastic users, engagement with technology, resource sharing, democratic participation - hmm, these are all things we've been desperate to have in higher education for years. We've largely failed in many of these (as anyone who uses a VLE can attest), so why wouldn't we look at what happens in SNs? It would be remiss of us not to do so.

However, there are some big cultural issues that higher ed will need to get over - in particular HE is based on a very hierarchical model, and is often obsessed with controlling the student experience. In a social network you have to let go. In short you have to accept bottom up over top down - and that will be tough, as it goes against 3000 years of educational instinct.

So, my conclusion - of course higher education should try and adopt principles of social networks and 2.0, but the question is whether it can.

Twitter business models - a modern day case study

(Image courtsey Bootload, via diy.despair.com)

Over the New Year there was some discussion about Twitter's business model (naturally I found out about it through my Twitter stream). This isn't particularly new, David Chartier suggested six ways Twitter could make money back in April. Allen Stern started this round of discussion, asking is Twitter F'ed? He argues that the Twitter client, Twitterific makes money by charging for the software, while Twitter hasn't made any money. Given that Twitter is chewing up bandwidth they'll need to find a viable business model soon. Stern argues that going for the approach of eyeballs first, business model later may backfire.

The ever reliable Dave Winer responds succinctly, arguing that Twitterific reaches only a very small percentage of Twitter's overall audience. If you had to choose, you'd want the big free audience over the small fee paying one. He suggests they could make their own client, but more importantly:

there are lots of ways for Twitter to make money once there are enough users. And right now their business is to grow and their first priority is to stabilise their service

Stowe Boyd suggests another method, that of reusing Twitter's social stream in other applications:

if third parties wanted to build other apps that use a twitter-esque social stream, they might make an agreement to reuse the twitter pathway. .. As long as I could push stuff through the pipe, I would be willing to pay a per message bulk deal. And I believe that the notion of a common social stream -- being reused by many apps -- is a big chewy idea.

Whatever the model is, the discussion is a case study in modern day economics. There are a number of interesting elements to it I think. Firstly, it seems that normal economics doesn't seem to apply. As is often stated, economics is the study of scarcity, and we are dealing with abundance. So what is the pricing model that works here? It may be that old school economics triumphs, you can't beat the old dogs, but it does seem here is a service that is hugely popular and useful. If it can't be made to work economically then there is something wrong with the structure of the market and our theories, not with the product itself.

Secondly, it is the ideal representation of the get the eyeballs approach to new businesses. This may be restricted to the US, I think Twitter would have struggled to get funding from UK venture capitalists. The conversation would have gone:

Twitter - "We've got this great idea for a service, we've trialled it and take-up is phenomenal. Here are the projected usage figures" (Shows graph with big staircase jumping off the top of the axis)

VCs - "Woooh, we like it! And so, what's your business model? How do you monetise all those users?"

Twitter - "We haven't figured that yet. Don't worry, we'll come up with something later."

VCs - "Bye"

Lastly, I like the way the community itself is chipping in with suggestions for what would be a good business model. In David Chartier's post he quotes Evan Williams (one of Twitter's founders) saying that "Our top concern when it comes to monetisation will be to do so in a way that does not negatively impact users."  And it seems that the Twitter community is willing to help them do that.

If I was an academic in a Business School, I'd be looking at Twitter as a test bed for how the new economics pans out.

Logyourrun quick review

My running rather tailed off towards the end of last year (in favour of mince pies and beer) so for the new year have a new schedule set up. I came across a 2.0 running site - logyourrun. Here's a quick review:

• The ability to share training schedules is useful. I created my own, but as is often the case, used others for inspiration.
• Having all your running tools in one place is really useful. I used to use gmap-pedometer to plot my routes, but logyourrun has Google maps embedded so you can create a set of routes to choose from. When you come to log your run you can then select the route you took and it will add in the distance and calculate pace, etc. There are also blogs, forums, etc.
• It has reasonable graphing functions, showing your pace against your schedule.
• The syntax for the running schedule you create is rather limited. It only recognises 'miles', 'rest' (I'm good at this one) and 'cross'. So if you use any other terms it doesn't add the distance in. As a runner I'd want terms such as hills, race, fartlek, pace, tempo and easy to be available so I could create a more sophisticated training plan.
• It doesn't allow goals to be set in terms of time as far as I can see, only distance. If you are aiming for a race goal, then it's not that you ran 6 miles in a training session that is important but that you did it at the required pace.
• It does have a blog widget - this was my main reason for signing up (although I've since found out Nike+ does this now as well, but my iPod Nano suffered an ignoble death when it was washed along with my kit). This is great, a while ago I blogged about shaming yourself into action (after Kerry Buckley's visible belly graph). Making my running log public is a motivating factor. I know that no-one else really cares, but having it public makes you less likely to skip sessions (or more likely to lie about it). One has to be careful about this public display of all actions however - the default setting when creating routes is to make it public, but as most of mine go from my house, this is potentially dodgy.

Readers' favourite apps as mindmap

I asked recently which three web 2.0 apps would you least like to lose, and had a few responses. So, in the interest of playing with Compendium a bit more, here they are as a mindmap, with the size of the logo representing the number of responses for that category. I've bundled some together, and used a recognisable single product logo, so for example some people said 'Bloglines' and others 'Google Reader' but I've put these all together here. The same goes for the generic 'blog' - people didn't usually specify which blogging tool, so this isn't really an endorsement for Blogger, they just have a nice logo.

It is not a very broad sample, ten people in all, but here it is, for what it's worth.

You can see the blog is the clear winner, followed closely by, erm, a blog reader. Maybe asking a blog reading audience isn't the best sampling method, but it does reinforce to an extent a previous point I have made about your blog being your basecamp in the online world.

StumbleUpon - seeing democratisation in action

The traffic to this blog bumps along around 100-200 hits a day. Occasionally it goes up if someone like Stephen Downes links to me, and it goes down if I don't post for a while, for example over the summer holidays. Overall though, it's pretty constant (as an aside, I have the vague feeling that mentioning your traffic figures is a bit of a social faux pas, rather like stating your salary).

Then on Sunday I had a massive spike of nearly 700. But it only lasted one day, on Monday it was back to normal. This is higher than I've had even when David Weinberger linked to me, but then his effect lasted over several days.

The cause of this spike was that two people had reviewed my post on 'My personal working/learning/leisure environment.' One of these Julia Lesage, an academic in Oregon. She is a big stumbler obviously, and her effect was considerable. I find this interesting because of all the talk of the democratisation of power, you need real examples to bring it home. For all the marketing you might want to do, the formal reviews you might want to commission, the real power lies with a silver haired lady in Oregon...   

Some thoughts on 'Founders at work' (or 'why I'm not a millionaire')

I recently read the fascinating 'Founders at work' by Jessica Livingstone, which has interviews with a range of tech start-up people. The insights are interesting, although I would say it's hard to draw many general rules for success from the book. Here are some observations:

• Working with friends or people you find interesting is the starting point, not the technology or idea, which often comes later. This seems to me something we rarely take on board as individuals or organisations. Several interviewees said they met some people at college and knew they wanted to do something with them, but didn't know what.
• It's a young man's game. Not many women in the book, and not many 40 year old professors either. Being prepared to literally sleep at work and share your house with your co-founders seems to be common. Many interviewees reported how they only saw their workmates, they lived together, socialised together, but mostly worked together. You can only do this when you're fresh out of college and don't have a family. 'Work-life balance' is not a phrase you'd hear often.
• Money isn't the motivating factor. Sure most of the founders dreamed of success and riches, but that wasn't their main motivation. It was passion for the technology they were building or the vision they had for it.
• Luck is a big factor. Not many of the founders had gone on to have repeated success, maybe because they weren't as motivated this time around and had acquired a family, but also because as many of them suggest, luck is a major factor in success. Often it will be a small decision that has big consequences, or a chance meeting, or an opportune moment in the market.
• Get bought out by a big player is a common business model. I want to explore this in a later post, but for many of those interviewed they only really had financial success when Microsoft (or someone similar) bought them out for X million. This doesn't really constitute a business model to me, as it isn't really generating revenue from your product, just hoping someone with lots of spare cash goes in to acquisition frenzy because they need to clear some accounts.

If you haven't read it, then it's worth a read. Be warned though, you might feel a tad envious the next time you get your more modest pay.

My personal work/leisure/learning environment

Following on from the previous post I was thinking about how I have accrued a set of technologies around me. This wasn't a deliberate policy - I didn't think "I need to construct a personal working environment. Here are the functions I need..." Rather I have come across them, experimented with some, rejected some and kept others. It was only when considering what tools I couldn't afford to lose that I realised I had 'constructed' something that might loosely be termed a working environment.

I've mapped it out in Compendium, and here is the image (click on it to open up in a new window):

I suspect my set of tools is smaller than a lot of people's. My criteria for inclusion were:

1. I use it regularly
2. It's outside of my formal work provision (no Outlook, Moodle, FirstClass, etc)
3. It is something I have input to, not just a resource e.g. Guardian online (YouTube and Flickr are a bit borderline here).

A few things to note about this:

1. The boundaries are blurred - it is simultaneously a work/leisure/learning environment
2. The accrual over time is a different approach from setting out with a feature specification, and is much more organic.
3. There is little integration between the services.
4. Most of the tools are very easy to use - apart from some knowledge base queries in Typepad and the instructions for creating a slidecast I don't think I've had to consult a manual or seek help for any of them.
5. Following on from 2) I didn't know I wanted some of these until I saw them. Take Slideshare for instance, I wasn't sitting there thinking 'I wish I could share my Powerpoint files easily', but when it came along I took to it instantly.
6. I can't really say why I've taken to some applications and not others. I could rationalise my choice, but ultimately it is a complex mix of personality, emotional response to the interface, perceived need, timing, motivation, etc. This does mean it is a personal collection.
7. There is too much Google in my life.

It would be good to find an easy means of sharing these, with clouds so we could see which tools are used regularly. I'm sure someone must have an idea for doing this (Cohere, the soon to be released web 2.0 extension to Compendium might be an idea).

What web 2.0 apps would you least like to lose?

This is sort of web 2.0 desert island discs (I know lots of people have done this before, e.g. here and here). Having heard stories of people having their Flickr or Facebook accounts pulled, I wondered what would be the service I would least like to lose? Here are my top three:

1. Blog - okay, it's not a single service as such and pre-dates the use of the term web 2.0, but it's my list, so I'm bundling it in. As I said in my post of why educators should blog, I see the blog as the base camp for your online world. Everything else spreads from this identity. For me it is the sine qua non of an online existence, and it's also the one I gain the most satisfaction from. If I lost this I would feel truly that my professional life (and personal to an extent) was the poorer for it. Blog - I heart you.
2. Twitter - yes, in at number 2, and the surprise hit over Facebook. I started back in September when I decided I really needed to give Twitter a decent run. And I'm converted. It makes me feel connected to a range of peers, in a non-intrusive way (unlike IM), it is great for finding resources, it offers access to a support network, and is also good fun. If the future is a hive mentality then Twitter is it's waggle dance. If I lost Twitter I'd miss out on feeling part of a broader ed tech community, hell I may even have to go to conferences.
3. Facebook - I still like Facebook, but as my previous post sets out, Twitter has removed some of the motivation to go into it. Facebook is slightly more friend and institution focused. At the OU we have started developing applications for Facebook, which I think will be a very good way for students to enhance their own learning experience (for instance they can find people on the same course, find a study buddy, recommend courses, and soon share their story, swap resources, etc). I'm sure something else will come along and replace FB eventually, but the questions it has raised about how you support learners in this space and take advantage of the community it offers them, without invading their space will be important ones for us to address in education for years to come. If I lost Facebook I'd lose access to some friends who I only have contact through this and I'd also lose a space where we can think about the future of education.

Honorable mention - Slideshare. I do like Slideshare, it's just neat at what it does. And recording bad slidecasts is my new favourite hobby.

And that's it - Flickr, Delicious, LinkedIn, 43Things, YouTube - I could live without them. I like them, but their loss wouldn't be as catastrophic for me as the above.

What are the three you would least like to lose? Remember to focus on what impact their loss would have, not just on why you like them.

Wealth of Networks session

On Friday John Naughton ran an interesting session around Benkler's Wealth of Networks. It was particularly welcome as I feel rather guilty that I've never actually finished Benkler's magnum opus.

John first set the context for the book, talking about the semiotics of the title and borrowed Castell's term about informed bewilderment to describe our current state when we look at the changes around us. That is, we have no shortage of data about what's happening, but we are still unsure as to what it all means. Benkler's book can be seen as an attempt to cast a scholarly light on this state of bewilderment.

Part of the reason for this bewilderment is that our analytical tools are not as useful as they once were (which is not to say they are completely useless). As John put it economics can be categorised as the analysis of scarcity, whereas what we have in a digital world is abundance. The scarce resource now is attention, and here the competition is now greatly increased from the days of TV dominance.

John also talked about the 'convergence fantasies' of many industries which always boil down to 'converge on to my device'. He argued that convergence happened long ago - onto the net.

He summarised Benkler's book as having six main arguments:

• Until recently we had a highly industrialised info economy
• This marginalised non market cultural production (“social production”)
• ICT has reduced the cost of production and publication
• Greatly enhanced power and potential of social production
• This has major implications for economic, social cultural and political life
• There will be a struggle between old world and new world.

We then went on to discuss three issues:

1. How plausible is Benkler's analysis?
2. What might it mean for education (and the OU)?
3. What might it mean for society?

In terms of 1) I made the point that to an extent it was empirically true - that in open source communities, wikipedia, flickr, etc social production was already a major economic force. So even though critics (Carr, Gorman, Keen et al) may argue against it, the best response is 'yes but look at the facts'. I was reminded of Clay Shirky's memorable phrase regarding AT & T programmers when they first saw open source support in action:

"They didn't care that they'd seen it work in practice, because they already knew it couldn't work in theory."

John set up a wiki for the session which has further references. 

LAMS presentation as slidecast

The world's least engaging voice returns with another slidecast. This is the presentation I gave to the LAMS conference (via Skype). It looks at the differences between web 2.0 and higher ed and how learning design can help bridge the gap. I've covered this in previous posts, but just in case you want the semi-live version.

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