The Ed Techie

Listphile - a man thing?

(via Dan Taylor) I have had a play with Listphile a site that lets you (yes you've guessed it) create and share lists. Yes, that's it - it never ceases to amaze me how small some of the ideas behind these web 2.0 startups are. You create a list which you can pull different media in to and others can edit it.

Although it's a small idea, you can see how this might grow. Rather like the real world, in the online world there is an almost infinite variety of very small ecological niches that some company (organism) will exploit. Making and sharing lists won't change your life, but it is something we do a lot. I used to carry a  personal top ten films, novels, Spurs players lists in my head, which were often readjusted, as if I was going to be asked by a journalist for these at any moment. I think this is a man thing, men like making lists (readers of this blog will know I'm not averse to a list).

So, just to test it out, and not because I like making lists or anything, here's my Asian horror film list. Feel free to add to, or edit, it.

I was going to add in some potential educational uses here to justify my playing with it, but instead (in a smug, postmodern, self referential way) I've created a Listphile list - Educational uses of Listphile. Actually when you start doing this it does seem like a really useful tool - I've done this list with a formal education cohort of students in mind, but you could apply the same to a broader subject community. Some of these would be really useful I think - best research question and best resource in particular. So much so, I think I'll add them in to my course next year. I would really like you to add this list (the Asian horror one, less so).

Teach the people - would you sign up?

Teach the People is a social networking site with an emphasis on learning. It's not up and running yet, so I've registered for a beta invite. It has more of a content focus than a lot of the other sites, claiming that

"Instead of just messaging with other users like on traditional social networking services, users on Teach The People^SM are creating their own communities for fun, education, innovation; whatever! User can then fill those communities with as much content & media as they desire"

I hope it works, but I'm not sure myself, and this was based on my initial reaction - I didn't instantly get the point as one does with social networking sites where the emphasis is on casual interaction. This goes back to a point I made earlier about whether learning is intrinsically a bit dull? Maybe if you want a learning focus you have to do one of two things:

i) Start with an existing social networking community and introduce learning tools and services in to it. For example, help people use Facebook to aid their vocational tasks, informal learning or formal studies.

ii) Start with an existing learning community and provide it with social networking tools. Take the OU students and alumni for example and provide them with an environment that helps facilitate social interaction, and learning.

In short you need a critical mass starting either from the social or the learning camps. Teach the people may be trying to do both at once, which is too steep a curve to climb. Anyway, when I get my beta invite I'll be able to have a more thorough investigation.

Facebook and Twitter - the status wars

I've decided to give Twitter another go (you can see it on the sidebar there if you're reading this in the blog). What inspired me was a couple of posts - from David Warlick who relates how Twitter was used at a conference and Ewan McIntosh who asks for the Twitter details of people attending the Scottish Learning Festival, so they can create a page of reflections on the conference.

It seemed to me that maybe having a Twitter identity was a professional requirement, a component of the essential modern identity an educational technologist should construct. But my problem is I've tried before and not established it as a habit sufficiently. One of the reasons was that I didn't know anyone else using it, so I've added a few friends this time round. But in the meantime I've become a Facebook user, and established a friends network in there.

Facebook status updates performs much the same function of course, and now that it can be tracked as an RSS feed, you might think why bother with Twitter? There is a subtle difference about Twitter, personified by its openness. You can restrict your notifications, but the default is open, and thus you can post your updates onto your blog or onto a conference web site. Because your status in Facebook is shared only with your friends this makes it more private.

There is thus a subtle difference between the type of update you post to Twitter and to Facebook, and the relationship you have with other Twitter followers and Facebook friends. I'm probably more protective about my Facebook friend access than my Twitter one. And this is what Facebook has built itself on, establishing a trusted and private network.

So, why is this important? It's because I am unlikely to bother to update both my Facebook and my Twitter status. And if we take my point about the difference between the two types of status then there is an asymmetrical relationship between them. The flow is from Twitter to Facebook, not vice versa, because I wouldn't want my Facebook status to be publicly displayed, but I would be happy for my Facebook status to be updated from Twitter.

But the flow doesn't go this way, because of Facebook's walled garden approach. So you can, using a nifty app called fbtwit, get your Facebook status to be displayed in Twitter. And you can import Twitter into Facebook, but it is another app, it doesn't update your status.

This was a challenge of course, so a couple of different programmers cracked it using PHP, including Blake Brannon and Kerry Buckley. It turns out Facebook weren't very happy with this and demanded that they remove the code or face legal action, and even worse, have their Facebook accounts closed! The Facebook engineer claims that

"we just can't let people automate against our site outside of the platform; it's a slippery slope."

This is not the real reason - Facebook could create a Twitter update if they wanted. And when you analyse it, this is quite revealing about the Facebook business model. The key issue for Facebook is that status updating is the jewel in their crown. It is the key to stickability for their site. If they allow people to update it via Twitter then the motivation to visit Facebook is lessened. Why is this significant? Because even if Facebook aren't sure what their business model is, they know it relies on stickability - on having lots of people in their site. 

But isn't stickability dead, you may ask. Isn't it all very web 1.0 and Jakob Nielsen? This is true, and in general syndication is the key now, as Twitter embodies. But, ironically, in a world of mass syndication, this makes the riches for winning in stickability much higher. There will be fewer stickability sites, so when you achieve one you get a lot of users. In the same way the long tail flattens the retail topography, but leaves a few very high peaks - the mega blockbusters. So while sales flatten out across many titles the big titles get bigger, such as (God help us) The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, etc.

Facebook are playing for big stakes then. And they know Twitter could damage their business model so it's in their interest to make Twitter available inside FB, but not, never, ever to encroach upon their main pull factor - status updates.

Which is another reason why I'm giving Twitter a second chance. The winner of these status wars will go a long way to shaping the future direction of technology, and as much as I love Facebook, one should give the open approach a fighting chance. Having said that - what am I going to do about my dual update dilemma?

My first slidecast

As part of the broadcast strategy review at the OU, I wanted to show the different types of outputs that academics can produce which might be considered broadcast in some sense. One of these is slidecasting (the combination of powerpoint and audio). I upload my powerpoint files to Slideshare regularly, so thought I'd try adding the audio to one too.

It's a bit fiddly - you have to upload the audio to a different site, as Slideshare don't host it (yet). Synching the audio with slides took a bit of getting used to (I even had to look at the help splashcast), but once I had the hang of it, was pretty smooth and easy to use.

I chose the blogging workshop I did a while ago with Tony Hirst. Be warned, as I've said before, I have an ideal voice for mime. Listening to yourself is tough (I ran the Bristol Half Marathon on Sunday, and if you think listening to yourself is deflating, try seeing photos of yourself running), I um, err and smack my lips like Cliff Richard quite a bit, but it's usable. So, here it is, enjoy!

Books, playlists and the granularity of ideas

I have mentioned this before, but thought I'd revisit it (hey it's the summer holidays, time for reruns all round). In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger gives a nice analysis of how the digitisation of content has altered our perceptions of what we thought was the basic unit. In talking about music he says

"For decades we've been buying albums. We thought it was for artistic reasons, but it was really because the economics of the physical world required it: Bundling songs into long-playing albums lowered the production, marketing, and distribution costs ... As soon as music went digital, we learned that the natural unit of music is the track."

Nick Carr disagrees with Weinberger, stating the artistic structure of the album, using Exile on Main Street as an example (wonder why he didn't choose a Steps album, say). Clay Shirky has a good refutation of Nick's claim saying that if the artistic integrity of Exile were as strong as he claims, then it would survive digitisation - it doesn't when you look on iTunes, most people download Tumbling Dice. I'm with Shirky/Weinberger on this, although I know what Nick Carr means, but the album didn't have an intrinsic artistic integrity, rather the economics as outlined by Weinberger came first, and then some artists began to explore the album as an integrated unit. If digitisation had come first then maybe they would have explored artistic avenues open to them through that means, but they would have been unlikely to come up with the album as the logical conclusion to musical output. It's atoms and economics that made this so.

I wonder if the same isn't true of books. They have a longer pedigree and greater cultural value than albums, but essentially they are containers for ideas. Their format, size and existence is largely a result of the economics of atoms. An individual could only be in one place at one time and speak to an audience of limited size. Therefore to get an idea across to a wider audience you need a format that is transportable, easily interpreted and has a low(ish, illiteracy still being a big problem) threshold to participation. This is something the church understood early on.

In the academic world we also have the article, which because of the economics of stuff, is bundled together with other articles in to a journal, ie a smallish book. So even though the article may be smaller in size, it still follows the economic route determined by the book (with the interesting addition that the publishers don't do any of the work involved in its production and take all the money). But with the digitisation of knowledge then it is free to follow its own path.

I don't doubt that the book will continue to exist, but it will not hold the monopoly on being the conduit for ideas. Just like Exile on Main St, some books have an integrity that justifies the format (ironically Weinberger's book is one such), but just like many albums used to be a couple of good singles plus filler, so many books seem to be a good idea stretched over 100,000 words. This isn't the author's fault necessarily, they had a good idea, and the book is the dominant means of getting it out.

But this need no longer be the case - an online essay, a blog, a podcast, a collection of video clips - all these are perfectly viable means for disseminating ideas. As well as the book losing its monopoly, so does text - audio and video can be used effectively. We only used text because it was transportable when ideas were tied in with physical objects. And if ideas become the equivalent of tracks, then perhaps the user creates the equivalent of a playlist by pulling these together around a subject of their choice.

The content law

Through the various projects I've been involved in recently (openlearn, broadcast strategy review, Flosscom), I've come to the realisation that something very significant has happened to the nature of content. It can be summarised thus:

"Digital content wants to be free, and will seek the path to maximum access."

Let's call it the content law. It can be seen as a variation on Dan Gillmore's 'the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it'. Evans and Wurster have argued that the digital marketplace has seen the unbundling of the economics of information and physical product. This is most readily seen in retail, where you have to see the physical object in a shop to know about it, but online the product information is separated out. David Weinberger explores the implications of this unbundling further, in that it allows  infinite recategorisation because the information, unlike the physical product, can be in multiple places at once.

When the product is digital (image, movie, text, audio) then both the product and it's information (and in the Weinberger sense the product is the information since everything is metadata), can be in multiple places. One of the consequences of this is that for any given digital market the ultimate outcome will be that eventually, and despite all the efforts to restrict it, digital content will be freely available.

Let's consider some examples. Firstly, photography: in an analogue world the physical photograph (or the negative) was the information and the product. If you wanted to buy a photo you would have to buy a physical copy. The numbers of these could be controlled, and thus so could the price. With digital photography the initial online offerings still attempted to sell costly images in the $100s. For the individual services like Ofoto allowed you to share photos, but only at a thumbnail, and only with limited people. They didn't want users to download the digital file, only to order prints from them. Then along comes Flickr and now we have largely free content, available to everyone.

In broadcast the changes haven't quite gone this far yet, but they will. As content moves online and companies like Sky and BT move in to each other's territory (Sky offering broadband, BT offering TV services), then the expensive subscription model of Sky begins to break down. There is too much free content out there to make it worthwhile. Large events (mainly sports) are sustaining the subscription model for a while, but eventually it will become unviable. Sky know this which is why they are branching out in to other services which people will pay for, such as broadband.

Lastly, music has been the one industry that has really struggled with this desire for content to be liberated. For years the record company ignored the internet (a case of commercial negligence), until Napster forced them to take notice. Suddenly content was free and everywhere. They fought back with legal action and restrictive DRM. The important thing for record company execs to realise is that the success of iTunes represents a step along the path to the liberation of content, not an end point. Increasingly artists are recording their own material, releasing it  online and establishing a live following. They are effectively disintermediating the record companies. Having established an audience the artist may then sign a deal with a company for some of the marketing, but this is only because we have the intermediate stage of CDs still.

There are a number of steps in all these scenarios. The process goes something like this:

1. The industry ignores the implications of digitisation and the internet
2. The industry sees the internet as a means to find a global market for doing roughly the same business model.
3. An initial outsider breaks down barriers, but the industry fights back with heavy handedness that demonstrate it wants to hold on to the original model and doesn't get it.
4. A halfway business model is found. The industry breathes a sigh of relief and execs open the champagne, because they think they have found a way to maintain their established business practice and enhance the possibilities of the net. They're wrong.
5. Through bottom up activity and newcomers to the industry content gradually becomes free and alternative business models emerge.
6. The established players finally realise the model has changed and adapt or die.

The content law may seem simple, but it has enormous implications. Let's try a thought experiment: imagine a matter transporter has been invented. The implications for transport industries, car manufacturers, holidays, property prices, retail etc would be enormous. The physical (including people) becomes digital content as it were, so there is no need to live near your place of work (or even to have a 'place of work').

The internet is a matter transporter for digital content. If you are working in any sector where the content can be digitised (broadcast, music, newspapers, movies, and er, education) then you should repeat the content law to yourself everyday, because it means you have to find alternative revenue streams for when your content achieves its nirvanic state of free and available to everyone. There may be some content which can survive this law, but you are probably going to do your organisation a bigger service if you assume the content law is true for you also and instead of trying to find ways to combat it, you seek ways to build new models around it.

elearning 2.0 and Christensen

At a meeting yesterday I talked some bobbins around web 2.0 and education. My last slide provided a Christensen/Innovator's dilemma analysis (see below). I have some reservations about the disruptive technology theory, or rather its over-application to everything, but putting those to one side, I wanted to look at how we might use it to look at the web 2.0 versions of OU e-learning. So, I took a list of OU concepts and provided a Sustaining and Disruptive version. My set of concepts were:

So if we take the disruptive technologies model, then these appeal to a different audience, while the sustaining ones appeal to the existing audience. So from an educational perspective the key to the successful application of web 2.0 to education is to ask what audience would the right hand column appeal to? If we can answer this then perhaps we'll overcome my concern about education being intrinsically dull.

Is education intrinsically a bit dull?

This question has been bothering me lately. Like everyone and their (lol)cat I am much taken by the enthusiasm, community, user involvement and creativity found in social networking/web 2.0 sites, and look on them rather covetously for education purposes. I feel like I'm at a big dinner event and on the table next to mine everyone is laughing and having a great time, while on my table we are haveing very earnest discussions about the Iraq war. It's interesting, but after a while, you want to find an excuse to join the other table, or at least get some of them to swap on to your table.

We're in the process of a few web 2.0 initiatives at the OU, including a social networking type one. In addition we already have the excellent openlearn, which is giving away loads of great content free, and allowing people to take it and adapt it. Except they aren't. Well, not much anyway. They are looking at it, but there isn't as much reuse and adaptation happening as we'd hoped for. Now this could be because it's still fairly new, or that attitudes in higher education lag behind those in the online community so reuse is still frowned upon, or it could be something to do with our setup.

But if we are to really map any of this 2.0 stuff across to higher education, then it has to have the subtle motivational factors found in the successful sites, such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, wikipedia, etc, etc. What a lot of these sites have in common is that they offer quick gratification and feedback (as AJ suggest, it's all Skinnerian conditioning). I know that there is a lot of indepth debate and involvement in these sites e.g. the discussions around wikipedia articles, but they also offer instant returns - you can set up your Flickr site and upload some photos immediately. Then you get progressive returns, upload some more, maybe you get some comments, you find some you like, you comment, you join a community, and so on.

Education doesn't seem to work like this. I think education is one of the most rewarding activities you can undertake, but that's not the same as exciting, and excitement is what seems to drive a lot of the social sites, in that they are either exciting themselves, or they are about exciting things, eg. bands on MySpace. The key question for all us educators looking at web 2.0 for education then, is 'does it have to be this way?' Is there something in the DNA of education that means it has to be worthy, hard work, a little dull but ultimately rewarding, or could it be restructured so it has more of these quick hits and progressive involvement?

If I was a cynical man I'd say us educational technologists will spend the next 3 years not really answering this question and then move on to the next big thing. But I'm not.

Lijit and connected learning

AJ pointed me at Ligit - it's a socially enhanced search engine. I've installed it on my blog, hanging around there on the left. When you sign up it asks you for your blog address, and then what name you commonly use for accounts and then searches for these, e.g. delicious, digg, flickr, twitter, etc. You can remove any, and edit it you have a different account name.

This part made me realise I'm not as connected as I should be - to my shame I hardly use delicious (just a habit thing), don't use digg at all, have a very old Flickr account, etc. The other data it uses for the search is your blog roll. I think this is quite interesting, you create a kind of network around you, and by implication you are saying these are people you trust.

Following on from my earlier post about a modern learning experience, one could see how a Ligit type tool would facilitate this. I may not be a good example (I really must update that blog roll), but take Stephen Downes for example, a Ligit search from him might find both content and people who would be useful. Not sure whether this application will actually work, but in theory you can see its potential for learning.

An everyday, modern learning experience

I had a modest, but telling, learning experience the other day. It isn't remarkable in any way, but it hints at what might be achievable and how learning will occur more often in the future.

John Connell is one of my Facebook friends, although we have never met face to face, but we read and comment on each other's blogs. I have added the virtual bookshelf application to my Facebook profile, and it displays Everything is Miscellaneous as the book I am currently reading. John saw this (I think this is what happened anyway), and posted a message on my wall suggesting I look at the David Weinberger/Andrew Keen face off at the conversation hub. I did this and found it very useful for crystallising some of the thoughts  I had been having around the RAE. I also watched the Clay Shirky video, and blogged about this.

An OU PhD student saw my post and contacted me about metaphor, we had an email exchange where I gave some references I had and they gave me some links too, with a paper in mind that I might write.

If you look back at that exchange there are lots of telling elements about this sequence, which I think will come to characterise much of how learning occurs:

i) It used a number of different technologies, which were of my choosing. Facebook (extended through my selection of apps), blogs, email - not a one size fits all system.

ii) It was largely informal, with hooks out to the formal.

iii) It involved people I trusted but who had never met.

iv) I didn't feel like a student or a teacher at any stage, it was a peer dialogue, through which learning occurred.

This is a fairly trivial example, and one might argue that it is not 'deep' learning (whatever that is anyway). This is true to an extent, but view this is in a context that isn't geared towards learning, and is still in its infancy. Imagine an environment (by which I mean a social environment, not a VLE), where the emphasis is much more on learning, where I am actively seeking knowledge rather than stumbling across it. The power of the network and these type of learning experiences then becomes much more substantial.