The Ed Techie

How do you connect - the rise of serendipity

D'Arcy Norman has set up a project which asks the simple question 'How do you connect to people online'. He says we are free to interpret that how we want, and responses can be in any format. He is publishing the open responses as it goes along. Many people have chosen to respond in video format, and here is my offering:

There different ways of interpreting the question, so I gave four answers. There is the purely technical, practical answer - so I connect mainly through twitter and this blog, plus a bunch of other tools. But there is also a set of behaviours associated with connecting, so you do it by linking (and being linked to - I find a lot of people because they link to my blog, and my blog stats tell me this, hey presto, we're connected), commenting (on blogs, or in twitter), responding to requests, cries for help, etc, but really it's about sharing. There is the social element to connecting, so I engage in debates (which can be related to work but might are as often about tv, football, politics), making jokes, giving people answers or experience, and what we might call just chatting. And the fourth way of responding to the question is to think in terms of fundamental principles one operates on which I list as embrace serendipity and be open.

I've probably said lots on the latter, but the serendipity comment can probably bear a little more examination. In an earlier post about Science 2.0 I wondered if scientists struggled with the web 2.0 approach because so much of it was about unpredictability and this went against their scientific training. Serendipity has come to the fore in the socially connected world I believe. It's no longer an eccentric relation at the family gathering, who may give you a great song on the piano but equally may wet their pants and fall asleep at the dinner table. Two things have changed the status of serendipity: the number of connections and the ease of connecting. Now you can rely on serendipity - something will turn up which is relevant, you just don't know what it is. 

Here is Jim Groom also responding to D'Arcy's project, who makes the point that these technologies allow us to 'imbue our work with a sense of personality':

So, how do you connect?

Becoming a multi-blogger

One of the (vague, ill-defined, unstructured) tasks I set myself this year was to see if my blogging/social networking activity could be bent some way to a more focused institutional benefit. I can make lots of (unsupported, wildly inaccurate, ego-driven) claims about the benefit of this blog to the Open University, for example it acts as a form of staff development, it forms part of an institutional dialogue, it raises the university's profile, it demonstrates the university's engagement with new media, etc.

But I also feel that my blogging activity has been well supported without any specific aim, and it has now reached a reasonably robust state where can I make the above claims without everyone in the room laughing (only some of them). So, I wanted to investigate whether this practice could become more central and foregrounded in what I do and in its institutional benefit.

One result of this has been the initiation of the digital scholarship work at the OU. We have created a site as a part of this activity (knocked together very quickly at our 2-day hackfest). After another iteration of this, I may propose to senior management that it is open to all (in the spirit of things), not just OU staff, but it may be that it only really works with the specific OU focus. One element of this is that it has a central blog for news relevant to digital scholarship. This is rather like my tumblr blog but with a bit more comment. I am also taking over some blogging duties over at the SocialLearn blog.

It is going to be interesting to see whether I can blog effectively for these different audiences. I started this blog as a separate entity from the OU, and although it is obviously related, I have never really had to worry about a very specific intention behind the blog. Hence I can spout half-formed ideas about music, football, elearning and general bobbins. This isn't going to cut it in my new (on-brand, suit-wearing, performance criteria achieving) role. It will also be interesting to see if I can spread my already meagre intellectual jam thinly across three blogs, and whether it impacts upon this one.

I guess what this really comes back to is identity again and the personal-professional tension. I believe a bit of the personal is essential to give a blog meaning. I created this intellectually challenging graph to illustrate my point:

(Graph produced at crappygraphs.com)

So this mini-personal experiment will examine whether I can blog to a different audience, and still retain enough personal element to make it meaningful for me and the reader.

Celebrity, blogging and the role of the academic

A couple of articles recently have provoked some thought on academics, blogging and the relationship of these to journalism.

The first was an article in the Times Higher, "I'm a celebrity academic ... in the blogosphere", which suggested UK academics should attempt to become 'celebrity academics' via blogs:

"There has always been a culture of the celebrity academic in North America," ...A particular academic can make a big difference. They are encouraged to get their name out there, and in many cases shamelessly self-promote. The blog provides an excellent vehicle to do that."

This isn't the first time I've heard the celebrity argument, but I think it misunderstands the aim, or benefits of blogging. It assumes that becoming a celebrity is the only goal for an academic blogger. This seems to me to exhibit a lack of imagination and makes a straightforward analogy of print journalism to blogging. Sure, there are some good academic bloggers who perform the role of interpreting events for the general public, but there are many more who write about their subject in detail, where the intended audience is that of their peers or community. If have a very specialised area of expertise, medieval dance (say), then it's not about becoming a celebrity by blogging about this, but rather having influence and being recognised within your (probably quite small) community.

The article continues to make the same blogging = journalism confusion, when John Kay says:

"I don't think academics want or need the pressure to say things every day, and I don't think people like me should pass instant comment on everything that happens in the world," he said.

"I think academics do have a responsibility to write for the public and to avoid charlatans filling the gap, but the way one does that is to avoid becoming a charlatan oneself," he said. "If I'm expressing opinions on everything every day, including things about which I may have opinions but very little knowledge, I'm in danger of becoming like them."

Bloggers don't feel the need to say things every day and comment on everything. That is the point of blogging, it is as flexible as you want both in terms of frequency and content. For instance, I didn't blog for a month and then did three in one day recently. And Tony might comment on things like MPs expenses from a data-visualisation perspective, but most of the time he is sharing experiments, ideas, half-thoughts, etc. This certainly isn't pressure to 'pass instant comment on everything that happens in the world.'

The second article that raised questions about academics and blogging was an excellent blog post by fellow Cardiffian Anne-Marie Cunningham. She had seen the BBC article that 'tech addiction harms learning' which was based on research from Cranfield University, and had decided to dig deeper. This involved actually having to purchase the report for 24.99. 

She gives a good analysis of the poor research (not wanting to give them an extra 24.99 I must confess I haven't read the research - make it open and I will), and in particular the lack of any evidence to back up the main headline. Here are some quotes from her post to give a flavour, but it's worth reading the whole thing:

"With regards to 'tech addiction' this seems to have been a self-assessment based on response to the question: How addicted are you to the internet or your mobile phone? The proportions given in the BBC report are those who stated they were 'quite' or 'very' addicted. Of course, we don't know what the students meant by 'addicted'."

with regards to plagiarism the authors state that "A high proportion of students (84.3%) openly admitted that they inserted information from the Internet into their homework or projects on a number of occasions." The tone of this sentence reflects some of the bias which is found throughout the work. The authors don't seem to be aware that if referenced it is acceptable to insert information from the internet into work, so the students would have no reason to be ashamed and fear 'openly admitting' this."

With regards to this addiction harming learning, there is no analysis relating the perception of being addicted to outcomes in learning. In fact very few of the questions are related in any way to learning."

This raised several issues to me: Firstly, it demonstrates once again, that not only does the blogosphere compare favourably with traditional journalism, in fact it is superior in terms of the quality of debate and analysis that takes place. Traditional media don't allow for sufficient analysis or depth of conversation - it is nearly always superficial to reach the widest audience, whereas blogs (and other new media), don't care about audience figures particularly, and are thus liberated from this concern.

Secondly, I have a concern that the researchers deliberately produced a report aimed at titillating the media to get the type of headlines they thought the media would like. This is surely antithetical to the purpose of being an academic. If higher education is to retain any currency in the information society then it is by providing an alternative to the increasing shallowness of broadcast media and offer intelligent, unbiased analysis.

Thirdly, having the article only available for purchase increases one's suspicion that the research has been deliberately geared towards creating headlines and therefore, sales. This once again reinforces the point about openness being a key principle for higher education. For a start it would have allowed a proper discussion around this research and maybe exposed some of its flaws. Wiley makes the point in the slideshow below that openness is the means by which higher ed retains its relevance in a digital society.

The Disaggregation of Higher Education

View more documents from David Wiley.

In conclusion then I'd say we need to move away from the idea that celebrity is some kind of desirable goal. As Baroness Greenfield and many others amply demonstrate, the mix of academic, celebrity and traditional media nearly always produces an unholy mess. Blogging (and other similar types of activities) are not a means to realising this, but a thankful alternative.

Born again

Not being one of those, you know, obsessive bloggers, every summer my blogging activity takes a dip. This summer we went to France for an extended holiday, and I barely twittered, let alone blogged, for four weeks. This happens most summers as the graph below shows of my twitter activity (from tweetstats).

Then every September I face the problem of getting started again. In this respect every year I get to be reminded how it feels to be a new blogger. When you are 'in the network' - you're reading blogs regularly, engaging with twitter, linking out to others, and blogging sufficiently to have comments and feedback then blogging itself becomes easier. What all this requires is momentum - you need to be part of the conversation/network/hive/whatever you want to call it.

It's easier if you are just starting up again though - within a week I'll be back in the swing of it, but it's much harder to get started with all this stuff. You need to build up your network to have something to react to, but you are also building on top of your own existing material. I'm not sure when it comes, but there is a (I don't want to use this term) tipping point when it stops being a graft and becomes something of second nature because you have sufficient inertia.

And in the meantime, you can always do blog posts about the struggle to blog...

A bava birthday gift

Over at bavatuesdays Jim Groom recently celebrated his 1,000th post. Stephen Downes made a comment that maybe he should do a clip show, which set me thinking. Us bloggers don't have much to give each other except links, so maybe we should honour those bloggers we admire with something more. So, below is my birthday gift for the bava, long may his insanity reign.

Blogging and academic identity

Blogging and academic identity

View more OpenOffice presentations from mweller.

I gave a talk recently about blogging (twittering, etc) and how we create online identities for ourselves. The slidecast is above. I wanted to explore some ideas, the main ones being:

• It is about identity, not technology X
• Your identity will be constituted from several different tools/services
• Your configuration and emphasis of those tools is part of what makes the identity (as well as what you put in them)
• An online identity is becoming default for academics now
• All this is driven by really easy and diverse ways of sharing
• There are numerous benefits to you as an academic

I concluded with two propositions, which you might like to disagree with:

1. Soon, your online identity will be your academic identity
2. There is an online identity of some form out there for everyone

I hope you find the presentation useful - I have to say I've come to loathe the sound of my own voice and my incoherent rambling so much, I think I may desist from doing slidecasts. Whatever my online identity is, it's not as a raconteur.

Can we talk of a blogging 'industry'?

Cayusa - http://www.flickr.com/photos/cayusa/2941045084/>

There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal recently which claimed that

"In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters."

My reaction was similar to that of a lot of bloggers - 'Really? Are you sure?' I left it at that, but of course, some others did a bit of digging. Adam Gurri gives a good summary of the criticism, chief amongst them Clay Shirky who rather takes the piece apart arguing that:

"their key figure -- 2% of bloggers claim it's their primary source of income -- would be well below the margin of error for data collected by a serious polling organization, much less for self-reported data, making that figure useless as an input."

And from this dubious figure they go on to multiply it by the number of bloggers who report it as their primary source of income, but complicate matters by writing

"about people making serious money from "posting their opinions", but later make it clear that many of these bloggers are flacks, paid only to post the opinions of the PR department, not their own."

They then do some dodgy things with averages:

"Average revenue for bloggers in the top 10% of revenue is even lower than the 100K median, and the median income for all bloggers running ad-supported weblogs is (wait for it)...$200. A year."

Shirky is right to take them to task for dodgy methodology, but I think there are some assumptions in his critique too that should be examined. Firstly, he dismisses people who blog as part of their job. But these can still be considered as people who are paid to blog (although the article wasn't really making this point).

It becomes more complicated when we consider that not all bloggers are 'flacks', for example there are a lot of academics (ahem - oh, me?) who blog where the relationship with their paid job is a bit ambiguous. Sometimes it is formally acknowledged with a set number of days allocated for it, but more often it is accepted as something that is done within your work, and outside it. So the number of people who are 'paid' to blog is beyond just those who are independent bloggers.

The article (and hence Shirky's analysis of it) is rather obsessed by the celebrity blogger and mistakenly gives the impression that you, yes YOU, can quit the day job and start blogging for a living tomorrow. That is very rare. Indeed, the celebrity bloggers are, in my experience, often the least interesting. The not very subtle sub-text of most self-employed bloggers is 'Why I'm excellent and you need to hire me'. This quickly becomes tiresome. My preference is for bloggers who do it as an aside to their normal day job.

The point I want to make is that, yes, the original article was dodgy, but even when I take into account Shirky's analysis I was still left with the impression that blogging (including the employed and self-employed bloggers) is creeping up on us as a profession. I would maintain that it's something broader than 'blogging' but also it isn't solely 'communications' in the PR sense either, since I don't want to read a communications officer's interpretation of what Lessig says, I want to read what Lessig says (but comms people you know I love you, and there is a role for this type of activity also).

All this is leading to a claim for legitimacy on my part. If 'blogging' (we'll use that as a shorthand term for now) is becoming a grown-up, robust profession/skill/industry then it makes sense for at least some academics to be doing it. It would be as strange if some academics didn't have expertise in this subject as say, law.

So, you see - it only looked as though I was wasting my time over these past three years.

Happy blogiversary to me

<Image - revised version of Evan's 3rd Birthday by D'Arcy Norman http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/48439662/>

I am three today. Yes, three years ago I started EdTechie, so here is another of those blogging about blogging posts.

First up, some facts:

• In that time I have done 451 posts
• I have gathered 1196 comments
• The average number of comments per post therefore is 2.7
• I have 1098 subscribers (although who knows how many are active)
• Most popular posts are:
• The VLE/LMS is dead
• A Twitter Love Song
• Social Networks will make us scared of kittens
• Ownership ain't what it used to be
• Future of content
• My first comment was by Juliette Culver (then White) on I verb therefore I am important, which was my about 6 weeks after I'd started.

Inevitably I've been doing a bit of reflecting, so here's a few things blogging has taught me:

Identity

Looking back on those early posts (if you've got a few spare hours, why not peruse the back catalogue?), it is clear I was trying to find the right tone. This is what has become apparent to me - it's not about blogging, it's about identity. I think I made the noob's mistake of being too personal in early posts, thinking I needed to detail every aspect of my life. I settled down to a more educational technology focus, but with a personal take on it.

The blog (along with twitter and more recently Tumblr, plus assorted other sites) is a key part of my academic identity. Indeed I'd go as far to say as it is my academic identity, or at least the one I am most comfortable with.

Multi-media

Things that have progressed since those early days include the use of firstly images, and then a range of multi-media. It is rare now that I create a post that is only text, I usually add in a Flickr CC image, or a YouTube vid, Slideshare presentation, music embedded from Skreemr or Blip, Animoto movie, etc. This ease of use of multi-media has been one of the big cultural shifts of the last five years I feel. Creating a multi-media posting is now so simple that the absence of additional media almost seems a punishment.

My blog has been very significant in my understanding of this, in that it has driven the awareness of these other tools, and provided the space to play with them, as well as the motivation to test them. Without a blog I would have maybe made use of some of them in presentations, or have been trying to find a use for them in courses. Which brings me on to my next point.

It's liberating

Prior to the web, one's only outlet was through official routes. If I wanted to express an argument or point of view I would have to write at least a conference paper or a journal paper. The academic publishing process had become so formalised that only certain types of publication made it through. While the scientific paper structure is good in chemistry, it was less well suited to exploring ideas in educational technology. The only alternative was to write a book, or get taken up through a journalistic route. While I could (can) write papers, there are a lot of things I want to explore in other formats. Beforehand we were shut out from doing so.

And whadyaknow, it turns out that there is this whole area of academic discourse we can have that goes around, inbetween and alongside the formal outlets. It's not just that this allows you to have a wider range of discussion around topics, but also different types of interaction. It also permits experimentation, which was both difficult to realise, and would never find an audience before. For example, I could have maybe written a journal article (albeit a less interesting one) instead of the Future of Content post. But I couldn't have found an outlet for a video from it. On YouTube someone has left a comment on this video bemoaning that

"this kind of superficial treatment, full of sound and fury signifies little of actual value. This is a poster child for the Cult of the Amateur."

The reference to Keen is telling here - this was an experiment, playing around to see if I could take a lengthy textual argument and condense it into a movie. I'm not sure it works either, but the key is that I could try it. The Keenians (and this commentator) don't want you to be allowed to do this, unless you pass through some pre-filter. This great liberation of expression and discourse has (and is having) profound effects on society, and I feel keeping this blog has been the means through which I have been able to experience it.

It's real life too

The easy criticism levelled at people who spend any time online or speak of having online friends is 'get out in the real world!', as if any time online necessarily excludes real life interaction. I've found the opposite to be true - I often meet people (at the OU or conferences) who talk to me with a level of familiarity that is born from reading my blog or following me on twitter. There is an element of kick-starting conversation. For instance, I am looking forward to attending the UK ed tech conference ALT-C this year because it is the first post-Twitter one I have been to, and I know there will be a big group of Twitter friends there who I can meet up with (assuming they're not all trying to avoid me).

Similarly in Cardiff there are several face to face meetings such as the monthly social media cafe Trydan, the Ignite series, Cardiff web scene, etc. These are all facilitated by the online presence people have on blogs and twitter. When you attend these the only pieces of information you need to impart are your twitter id and blog address. The online community has made my local one more significant and valuable to me.

So after three years I wouldn't necessarily say 'you should blog', because I think people have different forms of expression. Some may be great podcasters, or YouTubers, etc. But I would argue that developing an online identity is a crucial part of being an academic (or maybe just being a citizen) - there is an online identity for you out there somewhere, you just need to find it. And when you do, nothing will be the same again.

I'm aggregating, aggregating (a shiny show special)

Image: Different uses of tools from last post, created in Gliffy

Following on from my last post, I have been looking at tools which allow users to collect together different online resources for sharing. What I'm interested in is aggregating and sequencing content together so you can distribute your sequence to others easily, a kind of flash mini-course creator. Scott Leslie twittered the other day, asking a similar thing and pointed me at the wiki scratchpad for his upcoming educator as DJ talk. So I worked through some of these, and here si my experience:

Tumblr - as I mentioned in my previous post, I've rather taken to Tumblr. It's real selling point is the ease of use, simply install the toolbar button and you can easily add anything into your Tumblr blog. It is thus ideal for harvesting all the web paraphernalia you encounter in any one day. I see it more as a personal record, like Liam I see it as a kind of digital scrapbook. But it seems a very personal, slightly anarchic tool, so not really suited to my aim of sharing a defined sequence of resources. Here is my version of Tumblr.

Posterous - AJ Cann is a fan of Posterous, and like Tumblr it's easy to use and ideal for instant sharing and harvesting. Functionally there isn't much to use between the two, I could try and justify my preference for Tumblr but it would be post-hoc rationalisation. Maybe it was the aesthetics of the themes in Tumblr, I'm a shallow kind of guy, but it's often an emotional 'decision' between similar software. Here is my Posterous.

Suprglu - this is a site for aggregating the various social data elements you create in other sites and presenting them in one nice package, sort of like your Facebook/MySpace profile, but prettier. So you can add in RSS, your LastFM tracks, Flickr, delicious, etc. It generates some tags from your content also. It's easy to use, and if you are active with different tools and what an easy to create central hub to represent your identity, it works well. It isn't about sharing a sequence of resources as such, but I guess you could create a suprglu page for a project or subject, and not an individual, which would create a dynamic set of resources. Here is my suprglu page.

Glogster - I covered this in a previous Shiny Show. It lets you embed various resources into a multi-media poster. This is probably closer to what I was after, but you can't get a sequence from it.

SecondBrain -I signed up for SecondBrain ages ago, but didn't really get it. Like suprglu it is a self-aggregation (definitely not to be confused with self-flagellation) site, but rather more extensive with password authentication agreements across a number of sites so you can pull in your content from everywhere. My initial confusion over it remains however, I'm still not quite sure what it's for. While suprglu gives you a nicely presented site, SecondBrain seems to be offering too much, it is partly a conversation and partly a resource share, and I'm not sure it works as either. But it may work for some as an archive of your online activity. Here is my SecondBrain site.

FriendFeed - again, I've not really taken to FriendFeed, although I know some people swear by it. Initially I viewed it as a twitter rival, but it has become more of an aggregator, pulling in various streams from yourself and others. The use of FriendFeed 'rooms' which allow you to gather together several streams may go some way to providing the sort of dynamic content around a particular subject, but it doesn't provide the predetermined, shareable sequence I was after. Here is my FriendFeed.

Trailfire - this lets you create shareable trails across the web, with associated comments, so on each page a trailfire link is added, allowing you to read my comments, add those of your own, and then move on to the next resource. This is close to what I want, although the interface definitely needs a bit of work, and I'm not sure how robust it is. Like most tools it has an easy to use toolbar button, so I can quickly add any site into a particular trail. I'd like it to be exportable as embed code, but this is the closest to what I had in mind, so have a look and see if it works for you. I created a trail for the sites in this post.

I'm disaggregating, disaggregating

I had a play around with different sites for aggregating together different resources and social profiles recently (see next post for comparison). As a result I have started using Tumblr quite a bit. As a result I have found a new slice of my online identity which a) I didn't know needed expressing and b) is distinct from other parts of my online identity which are currently satisfied mainly by this blog and twitter with a bit of Facebook, LastFM, delicious, etc thrown in.

So how am I using Tumblr? Pretty much as you'd expect, it's my online dump for anything interesting I come across, any half thoughts I have, things I may want to use later on, stuff to share, etc. I never became a big social bookmarker, but I am using Tumblr partly for this function.

The thing that differentiates Tumblr from this blog is the close-to-zero threshold. My blog has become the place I think things through. This means I rarely post straightforward links, or comments. There are lots of mini-posts, half-formed ideas then that never see the light of day on Edtechie. I know what you're thinking: if this is the stuff that gets past his quality filter, I'd hate to see what doesn't make it - well now you can at Edtechie Dumbr! And what differentiates my use of Tumblr from Twitter is that Tumblr is more about resources, compared with social interaction.

To summarise: Twitter is where I tell people I am going to the cinema and discuss it, Tumblr is the place where I share a clip of that film and Edtechie is the place where I build it up into a laboured analogy for elearning.

The reason I prefer Tumblr for sharing resources over delicious is that it mixes in more ingredients and elements of the personal. But that is only a marginal reason, and others prefer to use Twitter, Facebook or their blog in the way I am using Tumblr (or to use Posterous instead of Tumblr). So here's my five 'duh well of course' conclusions:

1. Your online identity continues to evolve
2. There is overlap between different tools to achieve this
3. There is no 'right way' to use a tool
4. Share, share, share.
5. Embed, embed, embed