The Ed Techie

My edublog 2008 nominations

With all the usual provisos about awards not mattering, the Edublog 2008 nominations are open, so I thought I'd spread a little love. Here are my nominations (it's okay not do every category isn't it Josie? I don't have a best use of virtual world).

Best Individual Blog - I'm going to nominate John Connell here. John manages to combine quality and quantity. Almost every post sets me off thinking. I have at least ten unwritten posts which are responses to things John has posted about. I particularly liked his grandfather's social network post.

Best group blog - Pontydysgu - they're Welsh, they like edupunk, they do a crazy internet radio show and have challenging posts. What more do you want?

Most influential blog post - I'm going to go with Jim Groom kicking off the Edupunk thing. This was easily the most edublog fun this year, and took off so quickly that within a week people were declaring it old hat. Keep up the good work my wonky spectacled friend!

Best librarian blog - falling into the obvious trap, but if all librarians were like Lorcan Dempsey we'd pay them more than bankers.

Best ed tech support blog - I'm not sure if it counts as ed tech support, but perhaps rather obviously I'm opting for Brian Kelly's blog. Brian manages to push at the comfort boundaries of IT services, but does so with intelligence and insight into the practical issues.

Best educational use of audio - again, not sure it fits in this category, but I'll nominate the Talis Podcast series (and not just because I'm one of them). Always worth a listen.

Oh, and I think they should add in a new category: Lifetime achievement award. If there was such a thing, the obvious nominee would be Downes, but I'd opt for Scott Leslie. Back in 1782 I remember looking at Ye Olde Blogs for the first time and Scott's was one of the first ones I came across and found relevant. And he's still at it, and still writing great stuff, witness only the other day his post on planning to share.

Bush, digital scholarship and the price of reputation

Our Vice Chancellor gave a talk on Digital Scholarship the other day, a topic that is often on my mind (read: trying to legitimise all this messing around I do). Scholarship, or rather ‘having your scholarship recognised’ which is what people really mean, is all about reputation.

In the pre-digital world this reputation could roughly be pegged to other filters. Publication in journals, books, keynote appearances, research grants: all of these require other professionals to have filtered your contribution, so your reputation could easily be established by the quantity, and quality of these measures. Of course, it meant people learnt to game the system – how to get publications out, how to network so you got invited for keynotes, etc., but on the whole it worked reasonably well if you played along.

But the very nature of the digital world is about the removal of the filter. Anyone can blog, produce a video, podcast, and generally express themselves. So, reputation becomes much harder to verify. This is a problem if we want to start rewarding digital scholarship. Put simply, 100 peer reviewed journal articles probably means you are a decent scholar – 100 (or 10,000) blog posts doesn’t mean anything. So we need to find new ways of establishing someone’s online reputation.

Let’s take Tony Hirst as an example. I think we’d all agree Tony would qualify as a digital scholar. So how would we go about demonstrating this? There would be traditional contributions too, such as developing courses, giving talks, involvement in university projects, etc but let’s focus on the online element. Here are some thoughts:

• Quality of output – Tony, or colleagues, could be asked to nominate significant contributions (blog posts, videos, etc). Personally, I've always liked the Feedistan post.
• Appearance on independent rankings – e.g. Technorati, Jane’s 100+ Elearning Professionals to follow on Twitter, or the Wikio UK blog rankings. I take Matt Lingard’s point that, especially with Twitter, these lists don’t really mean much, but if we were trying to establish an overall ranking of reputation, then collectivelythey add some weight.
• Quantity, or variety, of output – maybe being able to show the range of online activity is important, e.g. blog posts, videos, mashups, etc.
• Impact – being able to demonstrate that what you have done has been used by others. For example, Tony’s work with the OpenLearn material inspired Jim Groom and David Wiley to incorporate openlearn units into blogs.
• Testimonials – quotes from others about your work, eg Jim Groom saying “over in Great Britain there is the legendary Open University, rich with an unfair advantage of knowledge and innovation represented by cats like Tony Hirst"

I think any one of these is easy to cheat or game, e.g. by getting into blog wars you can get your technorati rating up, or by publishing very small posts you can increase your quantity, but when taken overall they provide an indication of reputation.

Which brings me on to George W. Bush. Reputation, online or otherwise, is something that it takes a long time to establish, but only a second to destroy. Bush’s failure to twice get the Paulson agreement through congress seems to me less of a failure of the Bill itself (I have no idea if it’s the right approach, and let’s face it, no-one does), but rather a failure of reputation. Put bluntly, the Iraq chickens have come home to roost. Dave Winer first pointed this out, saying:

Flash back to the United Nations on 2/5/03. An impressive almost Presidential Secretary of State, Colin Powell, delivering some chilling news, not coming right out and saying it, but definitely leading you to believe that Saddam has nukes and chemical weapons and stuff even more horrible and is getting ready to use all of it in some unspecified horrible way. .. Well, I did what a lot of Americans did that day, I sucked it up and got behind my government. And they suckered me. And I'll never forget it. I got fooled, and used, and a lot of people died, in the name of freedom, and it was all a lie.

So Bush is suffering from having sacrificed his reputation in order to legitimise the war in Iraq. And if you are going to sacrifice your reputation you had better be sure that a) it’s worth it and b) you aren’t going to need it again.

An awful lot of what us online folks do is not very easily quantifiable. Exactly how does sending a joke message on Twitter contribute to our bottom line? In the long run what we are doing is establishing our own, and by association, our institution’s online reputation. Given Bush’s reputation collapse the next time someone asks you how much is reputation worth you can answer ‘ooh, about $700 billion’.

Digital literacies

I was asked to provide some thoughts on digital literacies for the Vice Chancellor, but rather than just do a dead email, in keeping with the spirit of the topic, I thought I'd put them in a blog post.

This isn't the research related view, but rather a personal perspective. Here are what I think are interesting about what we might term new digital literacies:

• Different voices - think of the bloggers you read the most. It might be people like Stephen Downes, David Warlick, Will Richardson, D'Arcy Norman, Alan Levine, Scott Leslie, Tony Hirst, etc. Now consider the top-cited researchers in educational technology journals. I'm not sure who they are, but my guess is it probably won't bear much resemblance to your top blog list. There are a few exceptions (Grainne Conole, Terry Anderson come to mind), but generally I think blogs have allowed people to find a different voice, and that has allowed very good writers who perhaps didn't find the academic journal an appropriate publishing outlet to have a voice.
• Reuse as an artform - Steve Jobs is fond of quoting Picasso's "Good artists borrow, great artists steal". The same might be said for new digital literacies "good educators borrow, great educators mashup". Taking existing material be it content, data, tools, and remixing it isn't just a shortcut or convenience, it is an independent skill of its own.
• Becoming a broadcaster - educators need to re-envisage themselves as broad-(or narrow)-casters. A lecture is a form of broadcast. You now just have many alternatives. Creating videos on your PC is, if not simple, at least achievable. Creating podcasts is a doddle. You can blog, slidecast, webcast, or hold forth in SecondLife. These are considerable skills to acquire, see for example the videos of Michael Wesch for how good they can be. Also, if you have the time watch all of Wesch's hour long lecture on a portal to media literacy to appreciate how the new digital literacies are not just nice add-ons but essential if we are to get students to participate in education.
• Multiple outlets - an additional point to the above, you now have many different possible outlets for your material, and often for the same material. A paper may appear in the conference proceedings, on your blog,on slideshare, scribd, etc. There are multiple ways of finding an audience.
• Social motivation - why do all this? Partly it's for the creative itch, we like to express ourselves, but more prominent in the digital literacies is the social motivation. If you post something you may get comments back, which may start a dialogue, which may lead to the expansion of your network.
• New metrics - I have talked a lot about this in the past, and I still don't know what the answer is. As I've often said, I don't want technorati to replace my RAE rating because it would end up influencing behaviour. But I do know that many of the traditional metrics we apply in higher education (e.g. publishing in 'quality journals' whatever they are), are simply irrelevant to understanding digital literacies.
• Openness as a starting point - following up from my previous post, part of acquiring digital literacies is about a mindset also. One of the cornerstones of this is that you start out with openness as a default - it may not always be appropriate, but it's where you start from. That way reuse, conversation and your own literacy develop.

The weirdness of copyright

I've written a chapter for a book with James Dalziel and we are asked to sign a copyright form. Now, I usually just sign these, but I've been getting fussy about this stuff recently. So, I actually read this one, and when you analyse it, there are a number of really draconian measures in there. If you look at it rationally you think 'no-one would invent a system like this now'. To be fair, they have said we can publish the chapter online if we ask permission, and this copyright form is fairly standard. But I think it's an interesting exercise to go through it.

"Author(s) agrees to, and does hereby assign all rights, title and interest, including copyrights, in and to the manuscript to Publisher. The author retains the rights to any intellectual property developed by the author and included in the manuscript including, without limitation, any models, theories, or conclusions formulated by the author. While the author may use any and all thoughts and research results developed or accumulated while working on a manuscript, and may rewrite, update, and re-title them for use in other publications, the author CANNOT use the verbatim text of the manuscript or any part thereof that has been copyrighted"

I love the 'author may use any thoughts' line - it's nice of them to let the author keep their thoughts I guess. But the key assumption we don't question here is that they own the chapter - you have written, edited, formatted it, but have surrendered all rights to it. This is particularly odd when you consider the next point:

"Author(s) understand that no royalties or remuneration will be paid by the Publisher to the author for the above named submitted manuscript. Further, Author(s) acknowledge the manuscript is being provided on a volunteer basis for the professional recognition obtained by the publication."

So, we do all the work, you keep all the money. Woohoo! Good job we like that professional recognition so much.

"The Author(s) will indemnify and defend Publisher against any claim, demand or recovery against Publisher by reason of any violation of any proprietary right or copyright, or because of any libelous or scandalous matter contained in the Manuscript."

And we have to carry all the risk as well.

"The Author(s) agrees that until the publication of the manuscript Author(s) will not agree to publish, or furnish to any other publisher, any work on the same subject that will infringe upon or adversely affect the sale of the manuscript. Furthermore, author(s) cannot post the contents of the article on any personal website or other sites, or distribute the work to others in either electronic or print forms."

I mean, seriously, come on. They have said that actually we can, as long as we seek permission. What I would like to know is if I put something online and it increases the sales of the book, do I get a cut then?

"Contributing authors will not receive complimentary copies of the handbook; however, publisher will provide contributors to the handbook with a copy of their published manuscript along with a copy of the cover page of the publication. In addition, Publisher will provide each contributor to the handbook a 40% discount offer if they decide to purchase the handbook."

I can buy a copy of my own work at reduced cost!

"The Publisher may permit others to publish, broadcast, make recordings or mechanical renditions, publish book club and micro-film editions, make translations, and other electronic versions, show by motion pictures or television, syndicate, quote, and otherwise utilize this work, and material based on this work."

Now, granted that Edtechie The Movie isn't coming to a cinema near you any time soon, but the control still resides with the publisher. As the author I would have no say in how it is later used. When you publish online you accept this to a degree, but at least a CC licence allows me to specify that it is share-alike, or non-commercial, so gives me some element of control.

Now compare this with, say, keeping a blog:

• I can still get the professional recognition,
• I still do the work, but I can style it and edit it the way I want
• If there were any money to be made, I would make it
• It potentially reaches a wider audience
• No-one will sue me if I put it in two places or reuse it
• It is free to the reader
• I own it

Hmm, wonder which one academia should choose...

When organisations commit reputation suicide

Fellow UK edu-blogger Doug Belshaw had the unusual experience of being censored last week. He had done a post back in May looking at various VLEs. In it he had compared them and made one provider, TALMOS, had come out unfavourably on some accounts.

Doug takes up the story:

The company whose VLE product I did’t rate very well threatened me (via my school) with legal proceedings. 

The upshot was that I felt it was in my best interests to remove the ‘offending’ paragraph so as to not cause difficulties within my school. I replaced it with one that, in my eyes, was more damaging to the VLE vendor: that they’d almost forced me to remove any criticism (however slight) by referring to ‘legal proceedings’ in their communication with my school

.
The point here is not whether Doug was right or not in his assessment, but that this is such a poor way to play the situation. When people talk about markets being conversations, they mean you talk to users and engage them in dialogue. A good response to Doug's post might have been something along the lines of "Sorry you didn't like it Doug, actually it does do what you want" or "We always welcome feedback, actually in the next update we're going to include that", or whatever. The aim is to engage the blogger (unless they're a nutter and are suggesting your software is made by sucking the souls out of children or something, but then no-one would listen to them anyway). It's a grown-up conversation we're having here, and threatening legal action is just not the way it's done. I'm always impressed when I blog about a piece of technology, good or bad, and get comments along the lines of the ones I've suggested, from the software company. It makes me well-disposed towards them, and likely to offer genuine feedback.

What the threat of legal action nearly always demonstrates is that those doing the threatening simply don't get it, they don't understand the nature of the online world and how you engage users, create mutually beneficial dialogue and generate good publicity. It's bad enough for any organisation to reveal this, but for a technology company it's reputation suicide. CEOs need to know when not to listen to lawyers.

Oh, and in case it's needed - these are my views not endorsed by any organisation I am associated with.

Technology as metaphor (or I'm on e-Literate)

I was really pleased to be asked to contribute an article to the edition of On The Horizon that Michael Feldstein is editing. As part of the procedure all the authors are writing a guest blog post on e-Literate. It feels kind of like getting the opening slot on the Parkinson show (US readers - substitute with Leno).

My piece is up now, called SocialLearn: Bridging the Gap Between Higher Education and Web 2 (surprise choice of topic, I know!). As well as talking about SocialLearn I wanted to make the argument that the technology we (individuals and institutions) use is a metaphor, or at least an artefact, for how we engage with the social issues. My argument then is that the conventional LMS is the wrong metaphor, not just the wrong technology, for engaging with some of the changes we are seeing that we might cluster under the web 2.0 banner. I am in the position of being able to quote myself, so I'll let M Weller sum it up:

I would suggest that the reason the centralised LMS is not the answer to the ‘web 2.0 problem’ for education is because in its software DNA it embodies the wrong metaphor. It seeks to realise the principles of hierarchy, control and centralisation – the traditional classroom made virtual. This approach won’t help educators understand the new challenges and opportunities they are now facing.

D'Arcy's Camus moment

D'Arcy Norman recently 'nuked' his blog, ie he took it all down and replaced it with the image of a nuclear explosion (he missed a fine opportunity for RickRolling there). As he says

"At first, I was just doing it to make a point, but I quickly reached a point where I was almost convinced I was going to leave it nuked. I was going to toss the albatross overboard...But my blog is strictly just a bunch of words. Just a bunch of talk."

This came on the back of some of the edupunk stuff and backlash which has rather gotten bogged down in dissecting the term. Interestingly, punk itself was accused of being nihilistic, and once you've said 'destroy' there's not much else to do (which is why I ended my edupunk vid with 'Create'). It put me in mind of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, which opens with this line

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."

He argues that a search for meaning and deity is absurd, and once we realise this, suicide is a logical conclusion:

"The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd"

(as a scientist and an educator I disagree with Camus - seeking knowledge and understanding of how things work is itself a solution to the absurd, but that's not the point of this post).

D'Arcy, like many writers, came to the same dilemma. Writing, blogging, suddenly seemed absurd, devoid of meaning. And the solution? Blogicide.

But he came back (unlike real suicide, blogicide is reversable). And that shows us that ultimately, even in the face of the absurd, the need to keep communicating is what keeps us going. I'm glad he reversed his decision, because I need someone to steal ideas from.

We're all Canadians now

Happy Canada Day by Our Enchanted Garden http://flickr.com/photos/enchantedgarden/178563428/

A tweet from Jennifer Jones the other day made me reflect on the prevalence of Canadians amongst my favourite bloggers/twitterers. In response to Dean Shareski tweeting "Now I've got colleagues saying to me, "Can you ask your twitter network.......?" Ask them yourself! I didn't say that but I should have", Jennifer responded 'Mine say 'ask your Canadian friends'. This is much the same for me - I have a blog rule that goes something like 'if one of the Canadians hasn't blogged it, then it can't be important'.

Here are the Canadian bloggers that form the core of my blogroll:

D'Arcy Norman
Brian Lamb
Scott Leslie
George Siemens
Stephen Downes
Dean Shareski

Then there are the 'Honorary Canadians', those who seem associated with the above, to the extent I probably thought they were Canadian at some point (indeed, since it's often hard to gather info they may well be for all I know):

Alan Levine
Jennifer Jones
Chris Lott
Jim Groom
Jared Stein

This is a semi-serious question: why do Canadians seem to take to blogs and Twitter so well? Is this a genuine observation, or just my perception? Is there something about the environment, education system or culture that might make it so?

I'm not sure Europeans can become honorary Canadians, but Tony would definitely qualify.

Inward and outward facing technology

Stephen Downes recently argued that we could classify communication as inward and outward facing, saying:

a technology like Twitter is, in my mind, 'inward facing', because it reinforces communication with the group - 'running with the herd,' as I commented on Noon's post, while I tend to favour 'outward facing' communications, those that look outside the group.

And he has this diagram to sum it up:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_downes/2379258809/

I'm not sure I agree with this analysis, as I think it comes down to your usage of the tools. Here is my reasoning:

1. I don't think many of us are outward facing in terms of the blogs we read. For instance, my GReader doesn't have many subscriptions to intelligent design blogs, or pregnancy, or snowboarding blogs, because these aren't things I'm particularly interested in. The blogs I subscribe to tend to be educational technology ones. So in terms of what I read blogs are no more outward facing than Twitter.
2. I could argue Twitter is outward facing since I tend to adopt a 'I'll follow you if you follow me' strategy. Thus potentially I am exposed to different types of people than I might be through the blogs I read. This would be even more the case if I were one of those people who followed 1000s of people in Twitter.
3. I accept that writing a blog is more akin to broadcast while Twittering is more akin to conversation, but even that distinction is blurred if you consider linking and commenting in blogs (which make them more like conversation) and the posting of links in Twitter. One could argue that because it is less effort to Twitter then people are more likely to post links to a range of things, not just those related to the subject area. In this respect then, Twitter becomes more outward facing.
4. The social interaction on Twitter adds a different element, which you don't always get on blogs. This means that, again, you may discuss topics or be pointed at resources which are outside of the group's normal discussion.

I'm not arguing one is better than the other, just that I don't feel the inward and outward facing distinction is appropriate to my use of the tools. Or maybe I've misunderstood what Stephen was saying - if so, just shout Stephen!

Whither the blogosphere?

A few prominent bloggers have, of late, been talking about the move away from the blogosphere. For instance, Stowe Boyd says that:

Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation -- the comments thread on blog posts -- to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social.

So, what are blogs going to be when the conversation moves away? They will be the place where we archive our posts, so that people can find them when they need to search, which still is a necessity.

And Scoble  argues that our digital lives are spreading out:

When I started this blog in 2000 there wasn’t Twitter. Wasn’t Upcoming.org. Wasn’t Google Reader. Wasn’t Flickr. Wasn’t YouTube. Wasn’t Seesmic.

And Hugh MacLeod tweeted this the other day:

Sorry, Gang, I just don't think I can do the "Blogosphere" thing any more. Gonna do something else. Already doing it, actually.

So what's going on here? Firstly, it's interesting to note that these are all active bloggers who have been doing this for years. And they're all self-employed, with lots of contacts. In other words, maybe the blog has done its thing for them. At this stage, it is more about the social networking than establishing a profile around ideas. The relative importance of a blog may depend on who you are and where you are in your career.

Scoble is right though - the blog used to have a monopoly on establishing your online identity. Even when the first wave of web 2.0 apps came along, they were usually to feed into your blog, e.g. YouTube. But now there this very central position of the blog is challenged. You have Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, SecondLife, Facebook, etc where you can establish an identity.

Having said that though, I think the blog is more than the archive that Stowe suggests. It is the place where you have more detailed discussions, where you set out coherent (or incoherent) arguments, where you publish work in progress, and where you explore ideas. The need to do this may depend on what you do - for instance in education, I'm struggling to get academics to accept that the blog is a valid form of scholarly activity. I don't think they'd go for the idea of everything being expressed in 140 character Tweets. But that's not to say that the more flow based tools won't augment the type of discussion happening in blogs (and tools such as cocomment could be seen as bridging the gap between the two worlds).

What I think is happening is another example of technology succession. The blog was the primary colonizer for the barren landscape of online identity. The presence of this colonizer changed the environment, which made it more amenable to secondary colonizers, e.g. YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, etc which relied on the blog to spread. This in turn made the environment even more  friendly towards the social flow apps, which started out linking to blogs, but have gradually taken on their own life. This resulting ecosystem will vary for each of us - for the people above the third wave of colonization has taken over the dominance of the blog and forced it into a smaller ecological niche. For others, the blog is still dominant, but these other tools flourish around it.

There is a hint in some of the comments above that this marginalisation of the blog is inevitable for all of us. I don't think this is so, we help determine that ecosystem, and for many of us the blog still fulfills a very central function, because of the type of communication we engage in.

But if it is inevitable, this shouldn't be taken by those who have resisted my call to blog as proof that it was a waste of time. The truth is that you can only get to the next wave of succession if you've been through the preceding ones.