The Ed Techie

And the winner is ..... Facebook

About two months ago I had accounts in Facebook, Academici.net and LinkedIn. I didn't use any of them much and was waiting to see which one would be of interest, if any. My money was on LinkedIn, it was the one for professionals, whereas Facebook seemed to be for under 25s who wanted to gossip and date each other. Two months on and Facebook is the clear winner. It has reached the tipping point in my particular circle, with a friend request coming in once a day almost (okay, once a week, I'm not that popular).

The reason is that Facebook has won is that it has cracked stickability, or maybe we should term it returnability. This is key to the success of social networking sites, he who gets returnability shall be king. There are lots of hooks to pull you back in. I love seeing my friends status and regularly update mine, for example. It also really utilises the network effect, so I can see who is friends with who, what my friends are up to, and now what tools they've added and what they're doing with them. This last one, the opening up of Facebook has been the factor that has put it ahead of the others.

Now, like every other educator who has an account, one can't help wondering what a Facebook for learning would be like. A few educators I have spoken to have said they think it's all a bit superficial, but I think it's quite powerful. Let's imagine you flooded it with content, had lots of subject areas as groups and maybe added in a few educational widgets. The network effect then can really aid learning - seeing what others are doing and saying is not just serendipity, it's serendipity squared. For example, I see that John's status is 'struggling to understand how analogue to digital conversion works.' I see that Davina has added the analogue to digital conversion animation to her learning resources, so I recommend it to John. I look at Davina's learning resources and find a tutorial on Ajax, which I add to my own and I also post on her wall that I have used it. Peter has also posted on her wall, and invites me in to a chat, as he is using it too. And so on.

So, the point is not could Facebook (or a Facebook type site) be used for learning, as I think it obviously could, the key question is, would people use it? Is the intrinsic motivation for using Facebook the social element, and adding in education (particularly formal education) would just kill this stone dead?

Well, the web 2.0/social networking project is about to start at the OU, so I guess I'll find out.

The Connected Academic quiz!

In the course I run we developed the concept of the connected learner. I think the connected academic is now also a distinct category. It is more than just engagement with technology, it is to do with attitudes towards value, pedagogy, openness, etc.

Anyway, in a fit of boredom I created the Connected Academic quiz (courtesy of Gotoquiz.com). It's a tongue in cheek affair. Go ahead and try it, it'll only take a minute or so and it might raise a smile. Let me know if you think there are other questions I should have asked.

Battleground future

A few people have been blogging about the battle for the future (coming to a cinema near you), particularly as it relates to how people feel about technological change. Stowe Boyd has been getting in to some good discussions. After Virginia Postrel he calls web 2.0 detractors enemies of the future. He says that Postrel “argues that these conflicting views of progress, rather than the traditional left and right, increasingly define our political and cultural debate.” I think there might be something in this. Left and right, as others have argued, are in some ways definitions from the last century. Other polar opposites have been suggested such as fundamentalism and moderatism, east and west, etc. I do wonder how much of my reaction to events is grounded in my general pro-technology and change stance, regardless of left and right.

I don’t go in for the rather confrontational stance of Postrel or Boyd however, particularly in education, there are those who have valid reservations, have seen a lot of it before, and may just take longer to get around to this stuff. I remember Peter Knight saying to me, after I had been disgruntled about a negative reaction to some proposed change, that disruption was one of the things he relished about academic life. My concern about this labelling anyone who doesn't agree with us about the wonders of new technology as an enemy, we are stifling valid debate. But, as I’ve posted before, I think a lot of surface valid reasons often hide a much more fundamental position on technology and change.

And then via John Connell there is a quote from Alan Kay, who inverts his own ‘the best way to predict the future is to invent it’ maxim to ‘the best way to predict the future is to prevent it.’

This did make me stop and think. Rather than just being reticent about change, the opposers could be seen as deliberately trying to limit the future. As Stowe Boyd suggests with web 2.0 we need to let it run. This sense of openness is a real mind shift. I came across a good presentation from Brian Kelly (via Beth’s Blog), who has a quote from Michael Nowlan who says his mantra is now ‘Yes before no; allow before disallow; open rather than closed; connect to the network on a device-agnostic basis.’ That could be an approach for any educator, not just an IT director and is very much about letting go of control – control of content, control of interaction, control of the environment, control of the future.

Class divide in Facebook and MySpace

Danah Boyd has an interesting essay about class divide in Facebook and MySpace (in short Facebook = middle class, MySpace = working class). I think there is something in this, I’ve always felt happy promoting Facebook as an educational platform, but I'm a bit snobbish about MySpace. It may be an aesthetic thing, a content thing or even a Murdoch thing, but I, and increasingly more of my colleagues, have a Facebook profile, but we don’t have a MySpace site. It reminds me of when I was young – you were either an ITV or a BBC household, particularly with regards to kids TV. We were BBC – Swap shop instead of Tiswas, Blue Peter instead of Magpie, The Wombles instead of Dangermouse. There seems to be something similar with Facebook and MySpace, which further demonstrates that these platforms are the new broadcast.

Future learning environments (the talk I never gave)

I was supposed to give a keynote at University of London this week, but I was laid up with a really bad chest infection (I blog heroically today). If anyone from there is reading this, my apologies. Below is the talk I was going to give. It was about future learning environments. The first half is familiar stuff - looking at the current state of play and setting out the succession model. The main slide is the penultimate one. Here I wanted to demonstrate all the different dimensions to a future learning environment. So I have the following elements and examples:

• Open content - examples are iTunesU, Openlearn and Slideshare. The point was that good quality content is now readily available and set to grow, so students will be pulling this in from elsewhere not just your centralised system.
• Virtual Presence - examples were Gabbly and Medium. The point here was that you can now have good synchronous engagement around content.
• PLE - examples were Stringle, someone's blog, and Pageflakes. The point I wanted to make was that users will increasingly gather together widgets and tools in a site of their own making.
• Devices - mobile, Microsoft surface and Nintendo Wii. Changes in interface design make different things possible, they also remove many of our reservations about training and development.
• Social Network - Facebook, 43Things, LastFM. Lots of points to make here, including the really powerful ways that Facebook has of motivating users to come back to its site (gifts, status updates, friends, etc) - we don't do this in VLEs. Also the way in which the open API approach means we can go out to them - our VLEs should be feeding into Facebook if that is what students want. And the power of the network to aid content discovery as seen with LastFM, which I've blogged about before.
• Virtual worlds - SecondLife, WorldofWarcraft. Not a lot said on these, but the point about establishing a presence where your students are, e.g. setting up a SL campus, repeated here.
• Learning Design - Compendium, LAMS. With lots of content what you need are tools to string it together to make meaningful pathways.
• User generated content - wikiversity, YouTube, Flickr. The general point that producing content isn't the monopoly of universities in education anymore.

What does the Facebook API extravaganza tell us?

I know everyone has blogged about the recent openning up of Facebook to allow lots of new applications, but hey, it's half term and I've only just got around to looking at it. Tony Hirst makes the point that it's beginning to look like a learning environment. I've had a play with it, looked at the widgets, updated some stuff and here are some random thoughts on what it signifies:

• Technology acts as a pull factor - I've gone back to Facebook because I wanted to see what new widgets they had (I added in the LastFM one). This demonstrates something I was talking about with the openlearn guys last week, that is by doing fun stuff with technology you drive traffic to your site from the users of that technology who are keen to see how it is being used. In educational terms this means doing fun stuff with educational content so that people want to see what you've done with Google maps, or twitter say.
• The social network is the starting point - rather than content being the main focus and creating a network around this, Facebook demonstrates that the network is the key asset, and then you add value to this.
• Adding features generates interest - I keep finding things in Facebook that I need to do. I'm not an avid user, so for instance I've only just joined a network (the Open University) and a group (Educational Technologists). But having these tasks makes me want to come back and see what else I can do. The educational point is that often we resist adding more features or tasks for fear it will confuse students. I've written about this in the VLE book - that a lot of the web 2.0 approach (of which rapid development is one) is at odds with higher education approaches (such as testing and scoping  features rigorously). What the pull in to Facebook illustrates is that more features creates a more vibrant environment. Not rocket science I admit, but still not something we necessarily apply to VLEs.
• Openness is the key to development - if we didn't know it before, then the Facebook example provides further evidence that open APIs and mixing of 3rd party software is the way to create a dynamic, vibrant site. The educational point is that most VLEs and many universities still want to create their own versions of tools.

I mentioned some work we were doing on a new social network based model of learning, which looks to be moving forward. It strikes me that 'Facebook + some educational widgets + open content' wouldn't be a bad starting point.

Finding the message in medium

I had a play with medium the other day. It's an interesting bit of software - it installs a sidepanel on your browser and then creates a visual radar of sites similar to the one you are visiting. You can see which other medium users are at these sites. You chat with them by putting out a general call on the bulletin board. I found it a bit disconcerting though, having these people watch the sites you visit. You can make yourself anonymous, but even so the thought of being observed feels rather intrusive, and so I turned it off and it has remained that way since. I also found the means of communicating didn't really lend itself to decent conversation with people posting rather banal comments.

As I said in an earlier post on Gabbly, I think there is something in these tools for e-learning as they can promote informal discussion around content. I think medium would need to work on the group allocation though - I can see it being a good tool for an agreed set of users to collaborate on a specific task, for instance a tutor group could perform online research using it. There is a friends option, so maybe this could perform that function (as usual I didn't have any friends so couldn't experiment) but I think you'd want to allow simple group allocation and lose the general waffle.

The scrobbling of sites you visit to create the web radar is a good idea also, although I don't want others observing what I do (not that I do anything unsavoury, unless one counts going to some Spurs discussion sites).

Is Nielsen a stickability kinda guy?

A few people (including Dawud Miracle) have blogged about Jacob Nielsen (it is law that I have to use the term 'usability guru' here) and his interview with the BBC where he suggested web 2.0 was neglecting good design. Nielsen speaks good sense sometimes (I particularly like his top 10 UI bloopers in Hollywood), but I've always found his design rules rather steadfast, or rather that people taken them and apply them too rigourously. I remember sitting in a meeting with the ill-fated UKeU and someone gave us a lecture on usability, based entirely on Nielsen, which was to form the basis of their VLE design. I pointed out that a VLE was not like a shopping site where users want to get in and out quickly, but was somewhere users spent a lot of time - weeks, months even. They would sacrifice some of the principles of good design over utility - e.g. they'll happily have lots of information on the page if it saves them lots of clicks to get back to the same point.

Anyway, although Nielsen is sort of right, and users tend to add widgets and content to sites with the same respect for design as you'll find for plot in say, a William Burroughs novel, I think he's also missing the point. MySpace sites are truly awful in their design, and yet there is something refreshing in their chaotic assemblage. Not being tied down by design laws has really liberated all those people (okay, all those teenagers) who want to create a site they feel reflects them. A teenager's mind isn't a very orderly place, and the sites reflect that. But this take it and mix it all up in a novel, unpredicatble way is part of the essence of web 2.0, and if design suffers a bit through that, it may be a price worth paying as from the mess genuinely exciting things emerge.

The other point is that Nielsen has been critical of RSS and blogs, and I wonder if he's not still stuck on stickability as it were. As Tim O'Reilly argues the shift from stickiness to syndication is one of the web 2.0 transformations. Nielsen made his name in a stickability world, and in many ways it's in his interest to keep promoting this view as this is where his company make their money. But in a syndication world, I am in charge of the design in my Netvibes, Pageflakes, or whatever site. I want others to provide good content, but I don't need them to provide the design. In rather the same way that the internet unbundled the information about a product from the product itself, so web 2.0 unbundles design and content.

Flickrvision and glanceability

I spent rather too long gazing at Flickrvision today (via Alan Cann). In a kind of web 2.0 orgy, I had some americana music playing through LastFM also which made it an audio/visual experience (of course I should have been twittering about it to really be 2.0, but I'll blog instead). Tony Hirst recently blogged about the concept of glanceability which we picked up from James Cridland. This strikes me as a good example, although I didn't so much glance as lose myself (perhaps we need another term such as procrastinatability or gazeability). I could dip in and out as I worked but it was more than just radio, and different from TV.

I have been having some thoughts about future collaboration with the BBC and one might be to generate glanceability content that is associated with a radio programme, so it can scroll across a digital TV or a web player. This might be OU material, or student generated material from OU students. Either way I think it is possible to have decent synergy between a programme that is of interest to students and content that is of interest to general listeners. I wasn't so keen on Twittervision as an entertainment or diversion, although I can see it may have good educational uses again if it was linked to a programme or event.

A critical mass of tagged, subscribable content

I haven't looked at Pageflakes for a while and went there the other day. I registered as a new user, and it impressed me with the default content it provided. It picked up I was in Cardiff from my IP address and provided me with a decent set of Cardiff related content, including:

• Cardiff news stories
• Cardiff photos
• A google map with Cardiff events marked on it
• Cardiff weather

Several things struck me about this, apart from thinking 'that's cool!' (as an aside can a 40 year old actually use the term 'cool' in any context without embarrassment?). The first was that considering it only had one bit of info to go on, that's not bad personalisation. Imagine what a learning system could do that had course history, user preferences, learning styles (if such things really existed), scores, etc to go on?

Second, this level of purely automatic content selection (I don't suppose there was a little man selecting content for me at the Pageflakes garage) has only really been realisable recently as we have reached a critical mass of content that is tagged (the photos were from Flickr and just used the tag Cardiff) and which is subscribable and available. Having been an advocate of learning objects a few years back (and as a means of writing, I am still a fan), this critical mass was something they never really achieved and so the visions of a personalised course didn't materialise. It also demonstrates, if further demonstration were needed, that making your content available in RSS and accessible (ie not behind authentication) is the key to both getting it seen and to a personalised future.

The last thing was what could an institution like the OU do with something like this, maybe in conjunction with the BBC? Users could receive calendars with appropriate programmes slotted in, maps with relevant  'learning events' highlighted in their locality (which could be user generated e.g. a meeting of the physics club in the Cayo at 8pm), content that relates to both their subject and geographical area (e.g. an example of classic Georgian architecture can be found at...), plus a range of general subject content feeds.