The Ed Techie

Edtechie has moved!

After 8 years on Typepad I am moving home to Wordpress. When I started long ago, there weren't as many options, and Typepad seemed fine. And then inertia sets in and moving becomes difficult. I'm moving for a couple of reasons: firstly Typepad has been having some problems, denial of service attacks, and people not being able to log in and comment. Secondly, I wanted more control and as "that open education guy" I've been swayed by arguments about controlling your online identity more.

So when I was moaning about Typepad on Twitter recently, like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross, Jim Groom stepped in and sold me on switching to Reclaim Hosting. Switching my domain from GoDaddy has been a bit fiddly but the Reclaim team have been great, and I know have a lovely new domain to play with, and have installed WordPress and imported my posts (the Typepad export/import worked like a dream I have to say).

So, unveiling the new blog.... http://blog.edtechie.net/ (RSS: http://blog.edtechie.net/feed/ - if you used feedburner it will update automatically)

I'll leave this one here for a while so all the old links will work, but won't post on here anymore. Moving is kinda scary, I realised how much I've invested in this blog. But you know what? It's just a blog. And Alan Cann tells me blogging is dead anyway. Also it's very exciting to have my own domain now, and all that I can play around with on there. I'll have to invest in some geeky t-shirts.

 

 

 

 

 

The best edtech book you've never read was published last week

And indeed is published every week. 

I'm referring to Stephen Downes' OLWeekly, where he gives a round up of all the material he's commented on that week. Like many of you I subscribe to the email, and when it came through on Friday, I was struck by how much great stuff there was in there this week. I thought "this could be an edited book". So I decided to see just what it would be like as a book.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting it should be a book, in many ways the book is an inferior format since you lose the comments and the media. But it's an interesting comparison. We know what editing a book takes, and if someone said they were going to edit a book every week, we'd think they were insane. So, I went through OLWeekly, and copied Stephen's comments and the article into a PDF. I missed some out because they were too long or they were newspaper/magazine articles who would probably send drones after me for copying their material. If I have included anyone's content here and they want it removed, let me kow. I'm not really interested in distributing it, just the point of comparison. The resultant PDF was 252 pages long. You can have a look for yourself: Download Downes_weekly. I didn't bother with any formatting, and some images are missing, I only had an hour. 

There are two interesting things that the exercise raised for me. The first is to recognise the great work Stephen does every week. What I admire about Stephen most is his endurance. I might have had an idea to do this, would have done about three and then given up. Stephen reminds me of an artist who goes in and out of fashion, produces albums of varying interest and quality, but what you come to admire most is their durability and their resolution to keep doing interesting things. Think Neil Young. With not much more effort in terms of copyediting and layout this could be a proper book, and the range of material in there is truly impressive. And he does this every week. We recognise book editing, but web curation isn't normally acknowledged, there is no yardstick for measuring it. So comparison with book editorship is useful from that perspective at least.

The second point is that if you were to try and create a book that covered these topics it would probably take you a year or so. You'd need to organise a publishing deal, cajole the writers, sort out rights, get it through copyediting, etc. When blogging was all fresh we used to comment a lot about the freedom it gave, and make these sort of comparisons, but we take it for granted now. It's worth noting it occassionally though - this is still pretty amazing stuff, and it calls to mind Scott Leslie's classic Just Share post. It really is the most efficient way to operate.

And if all that wasn't interesting, here is a picture of Stephen on a steer:

 

What do all these numbers mean?

<image - http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmorgan8186/5946796450/>

Bloggers, or anyone who maintains an online profile, have an ambiguous relationship with visitor stats and data. On the one hand we like to dismiss them as meaningless, but then secretly feel chuffed when we can outscore someone. I've tried to promote them as one way of measuring impact, but with the caveat that context is important. For instance, if you're a blogger in a relatively obscure area, such as Barry Town football club, then your range is limited and unlikely to compare in absolute numbers with, say, a blog reviewing Apple products.

I recently passed 300,000 views on this blog, over about 700 posts - that's not as exciting as it might sound as I've been going since about 2006. My friend Liam says he gets about 200K a year on his mobile tech blog. Here are some more stats from tools I use:

• Slideshare - 220,000 views over 6 years on 59 presentations
• Blipfoto - 92,000 views over 420 entries
• Flickr - 49,000 views over 1,140 photos
• Citations on academic articles - 1,620 (according to Google)

The first thing to ask is how reliable is this data? Tony can probably answer that better than me, but I think the blog traffic doesn't take into people who subscribe via RSS, so in that case underestimates. At the same time it does include my own obsessive self-clicking, so that may even out. It may also include bot traffic which doesn't really mean anything at all.

But if we take the data as accurate for now, the more interesting question is what does it mean? I would like to make the case that 300,000 visits to my blog equals 300,000 careful, considered reading of my posts, but the data doesn't back that up. Google analytics tells me that my average visit duration is 57 seconds. I suppose that is just about the time it takes to read a blog post, but it probably doesn't compare well with time taken on reading academic articles. My bounce rate is high too, at around 85%, so people come in, read a post and then go elsewhere, but I think that's fairly typical for blogs, I'm not providing a newspaper where you want people to go from one feature to another.

Blipfoto probably has the highest return on audience per post, and does better than Flickr. This provides a nice comparison as I have linked my blipfoto account to twitter, so it automatically tweets when I post, but I haven't done this for Flickr (which I think of more as a repository). I get 219 views per post on blipfoto versus 42 on Flickr, so we could say that the effect of linking to twitter is a 5-fold increase in traffic (if that's what you want). But I would say that Blipfoto is the most personal of these tools and the least connected to my professional life, so I wouldn't argue for any professional impact here.

What I think we're struggling with here is the newness of all this. What is the value of a slideshare view versus a download of a paper? Is there a conversion rate? I've tried to keep a foot in both the traditional camp, through publications, and the new forms of dissemination, so these figures might offer a reasonable comparison between the two. Looking at my citations you could crudely say that one citation is worth about 200 blog views (or vice versa).

However, it's probably futile to try and measure these things. It's not as if citations are a particularly reliable metric anyway, so we shouldn't use those as a currency to convert everything else into. It will also vary widely depending on discipline, and individual. And more importantly, we already have plenty of systems that our career path requires us to game, so why invent more?

Make no mistake, turning altmetrics into performance measures linked to real things like promotion, job security, money would have negative effects. For example, there is a correlation between number of posts and views, so if I was purely chasing the numbers I should post more often, regardless of quality (what quality?), or I might think I could get better numbers from splitting this post into three separate ones. This already happens in traditional outputs, I remember someone advising me not to write books because for the same effort I could have 5 REFable publications. This return on investment view ignores the internal validity of the form. I also tend to think of blogging as a social function, connecting with friends and peers, but if I'm linking it to direct returns then it's another example of monetising relationships that Brian is so uneasy about.

But when I've tried to make the case for digital scholarship and tenure, it is something along these lines that I want to argue - that the impact you see here is as valid as the impact we have chosen to recognise and measure. So we need to start thinking about what these numbers do mean for academics - we just need to make sure we don't turn them into the thing itself, with all of us chasing and parading numbers. But maybe that's inevitable as soon as you shine a light on them, in which case, ignore this post.

Edukashun is brocken - the Tumblr

To save me clogging up this blog by banging on about the lazy 'education is broken' meme used to justify venture capital, I've set up one of those Tumblr blogs that gathers stuff together here: http://brokeneducation.tumblr.com/

I think there's a slight danger that like Pseuds Corner in Private Eye it ends up including too much. In the case of Pseuds corner it sometimes seems that any attempt to use words of more than one syllable will be lampooned. Similarly, this tumblr may end up including any attempt to talk about the future of education. In general what I want are those pieces where the education is broken meme is trotted out largely as a pretence for some solution the company or individual has to offer. But I'll take anything in this area really. I would like to pretend that one day I'll go through them and do a semantic analysis or cluster analysis of concepts. But I'll probably just make a sarcastic one-liner instead.

Any suggestions for inclusion just tweet me @mweller.

Mildly interesting aside - I often talk about finding the right voice for a blog. This one is the carefully considered, balanced, poorly written one. I found that as soon as I started doing this tumblr blog it revealed a much snarkier, sarcastic me. Some people may like that, others not.

Quick blogging survey

Alice Bell is conducting some research for us at IET, so this is asking you (yes YOU) to participate. Alice says "email answers to [email protected]. Or you can cut and paste it to post it on your blog, if you want to share your answers with your readers (although please drop me a line with the link so I can make sure I have a copy)"

Well, I'd best respond too:


Blog URL:
edtechie.net

What do you blog about?
Digital scholarship, Open education, educational technology, social media, impact of new technology.

Are you paid to blog?
No.

What do you do professionally (other than blog)?
I'm a Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University.

How long have you been blogging at this site?
Six years.

Do you write in other platforms? (e.g. in a print magazine?)
I've published books and academic papers, and occasionally (when asked) for other publications eg Chronicle of Higher Education, but not on a regular basis

Can you remember why you started blogging?
My colleagues John Naughton and Tony Hirst had been doing it for a while, and I read lots of blogs, so it seemed like a natural progression.

What keeps you blogging?
It's a habit and it provides an outlet for ideas that would otherwise never see the light of day. It is also part of my academic identity now, so there is an element of inertia in keeping it going.

Do you have any idea of the size or character if your audience? How?
It has about 2000 subscribers plus gets around 30,000 visits a year (Google Analytics). Most of the audience are practitioners in higher ed with an interest in technology, but across a range of disciplines.

What’s your attitude to/relationship with people who comment on your blog?
They are often people I've come to know either personally or through twitter. Much of the commenting now happens away from the blog, on twitter. I'm always pleased that someone takes the effort to comment, although which posts will attract comments is very unpredictable. They are nearly always friendly, and helpful - pointing me at other resources or helping to develop an argument.

Do you feel as if you fit into any particular community, network or genre of blogging? (e.g. schools, science, education, museums, technology)
Edubloggers (I guess)

If so, what does that community give you?
I've come to think of it as my extended, global, network of peers, very similar (but bigger) to my peer network at work. 

What do you think are the advantages of blogging? What are its disadvantages/ limitations?
I think I covered the advantages in this piece: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Virtues-of-Blogging-as/131666/

Disadvantages are that it probably has decreased the amount of traditional publication I've done (which may impact on things like the REF). There is a small element of compulsion to it - I tend to blog on average about once a week, so if a few weeks have gone by, I feel I shoud blog _something_. 

Do you tell people you know offline that you’re a blogger? (e.g. your grandmother, your boss)
I don't think my parents know what a blog is, but most other people know that I blog eg friends, family. I don't think (or expect) that they read it as it's quite narrowly focused on educational technology, ie I don't blog about my holiday.

Is there anything else you want to tell me about I haven’t asked?
I've said too much already...

Blogging was the best decision

I have an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was asked to write a piece about the role of blogging in academic life. In many ways this is a tad quaint, blogging is hardly the new kid on the block (indeed it is now ripe for the X is dead meme). But maybe that's the point, it's been around long enough that we can assess its impact in real terms, and not just as the new shiny thing. My approach was to take blogging as a representative for new forms of scholarship, and how it had impacted upon my practice. 

There is nothing in it that will be a surprise to readers of this blog (it doesn't contain unusual cake recipes for instance), but it was quite nice to reflect on blogging from some position of maturity (by which I mean having been blogger for a few years now, not that I am mature, which of course, I'm not). The gist is probably in this paragraph:

In terms of intellectual fulfilment, creativity, networking, impact, productivity, and overall benefit to my scholarly life, blogging wins hands down. I have written books, produced online courses, led research efforts, and directed a number of university projects. While these have all been fulfilling, blogging tops the list because of its room for experimentation and potential to connect to timely intelligent debate. That keeps blogging at the top of the heap.

The ups & downs of embracing unpredictability

In a recent presentation I argued that producing low cost content as a by-product allowed institutions to embrace unpredictability, in a way they can't do when spending large sums of money on content. If you are spending a decent amount of money you need a project, with identified target customers, objectives, key performance indicators, a budget, lines of responsibility, etc. But a lot of the fun stuff online happens unpredictably. The makers of Downfall didn't intend for it to be an internet meme  after all (and then blew their chance when it became one). As John Naughton puts it the net is "a global machine for springing surprises".

In a small way I had an example last week, which will be familiar to many bloggers. I wrote a post about peer review, the essence of which was to say I would no longer review for closed journals. I knocked it out fairly quickly, in half an hour while I was waiting for a meeting to start (blogging is great for filling these gaps) and did some quick calculations. John Naughton blogged it, and from John's link I received the equivalent of the blogging Legion D'Honneur, Cory Doctorow blogged it at BoingBoing. A ripple then starts so a few others blogged it (including Richard Stallman and George Siemens). You can see this peak of traffic here:

This is fun when it happens, but you can't predict it. In my view the previous post to that one, on new local newspaper models, was a better one. But you'd drive yourself insane by attempting to predict which posts get picked up and by who. There is undoubtedly a threshold - once someone like BoingBoing links to a post then there will be an almost guaranteed level of traffic. But there are too many variables to know when something might get linked to. The message for this is twofold - firstly just keep going, and secondly, be very wary of any expert who tells you they know how to generate traffic and control that pesky unpredictably.

Content may not be king anymore, but it has some influential friends

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a two day staff development workshop here at the OU. It had been very well organised by the Social Sciences Faculty and the aim was to get staff thinking about using new technologies to solve some of their problems in teaching. There had been some good initial work, so the groups came with problems they wanted to address, eg student retention from 1st to 2nd level, encouraging reflection, etc.

I was asked to present on the use of blogs and wikis. I gave a brief whizz through and tried to convey my enthusiasm for them as educational tools (I ended with a half-jesting 'eat my hat challenge' that whatever their issue was, I could solve it with blogs and wikis).

Why use blogs and wikis?

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

There were also presentations on:

• Interactive quizzes
• Screen/slide casting
• Podcasting

The groups then had some hands on sessions and had to choose two technologies and on the second day, set about solving their problem with these technologies.

Can you guess which of the four technologies was most popular? The answer is Screen/slide casting, with every group wanting to create one of these, and the other three all about equal after that. I think this may have been because it was more immediate (blogs take some time to get going and you need students really) and thus suited the workshop format more readily. But I think it is also something to do with educators relation to content.

In the age of the social network, it has become a cliche to say that content is no longer king, but it is something that people can readily engage with, rather than some of the more nebulous and longer-term benefits of blogging. I saw a lot of academics very excited by the liberating effect of being able to produce their own content (this was something I had pushed as a benefit of blogs also, the easy multi-media aspect). One downloaded Camtasia and was off making videos, another used Xtranormal and soon they were producing complex ideas and scripts.

The take-away message for me then was that many people are unaware of how easy it has become to create multi-media content, and that demonstrating this is a good 'way in' to appreciating the potential of a whole range of new(ish) technologies.

The Nessman Cometh

It comes to pass...

Scott Leslie is coming to stay at the OU for a month under an OLNet fellowship. Scott is one of my long time blog/Twitter chums and his blog was one of the very first I started reading back when we used to say 'blog is short for weblog'.

As I commented in an earlier post, I don't view online friendships as f2f ones waiting to happen, but even so it'll be great to finally meet.

So this is just to ask three sets of people if they fancy a meet-up with Scott while he's here:
OU people- I'll try and get Scott to give a talk, but informal chats would be goodyoo so let me know if you fancy an edtech coffee.
Cardiff social media/bloggers - Scitt wil probably come down for a weekend so maybe we can arrange a meet-up.
UK edubloggers - wonder if we could organise something?

Let me know in the comments, we need to show these Canadians what they're missing.

Montaigne, the Godfather of blogging

 

I am reading Sarah Bakewell's marvellous 'How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer'. She uses Montaigne's essays as the basis for a biography and also to extract a number of lessons, such as 'Don't worry about death', 'Be convivial' and (my favourite) 'Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted'.

Montaigne seems to me to have many of the characteristics in his writing which today we associate with good bloggers. Although, as Bakewell points out, every generation finds their own interpretation of Montaigne, so this is really more a reflection of my interests than perhaps some truth about him, so for instance William Deresiewicz uses Montaigne to justify his anti-social network rant.

I'm not the first person to link Montaigne to blogging, via Lorcan Dempsey I found this piece by Andrew Sullivan called 'Why I blog' in which he says:

"Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. Montaigne, for good measure, also peppered his essays with myriads of what bloggers would call external links"

For me Montaigne shows the way for good bloggers through the following practices:

• Honesty - you really can't blog if you've got a hidden agenda. People have too much choice and so what you are after is some form of connection and this comes from people having good ideas, but also from connecting to them as an individual.
• Openness - as Sullivan points out in the quote above, one of the endearing qualities of Montaigne was his willingness to think out in the open. This is what bloggers do well, they put forward ideas, take criticism and comments, and develop those ideas partly in conjunction with their readers. They don't work quietly for three years and then release a finished masterpiece (this is a good way of working for some writing, maybe novels, but not for blogs).
• Relaxed style - Montaigne really developed that chatty, informal style which is a lot harder than he makes it look. This is definitely the style that works best in blogs, because, to reiterate the point, part of what makes a good blog is a connection to the author.
• An element of the personal - Montaigne's essays are famously rambling and rarely connected to the title. This approach doesn't always work in blogs, which tend to be shorter posts focused on a particular point, but what does carry over is the way he brought in personal elements to back up and reinforce wider points, which a good blogger does without making it a boring shopping list.
• Reflective and questioning - good bloggers (and when I say a good blogger, I probably mean 'bloggers I like reading') seem to me to adopt Montaigne's reflective approach, questioning themselves, and others. One of the delights of blogging is that it has no commercial masters to please and so bloggers tend to dig around a story, analyse it in detail and question every aspect of it (unlike many journalists who accept the PR from a company to fill space).
• Playfulness - I like bloggers who toy with ideas, mess around with media and inject some playfulness into their posts. Blogs liberate us from the considerations of many formal publications and I like people who embrace this.
• Owning a vineyard - oh, okay that one doesn't apply.