The Ed Techie

My first slidecast

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

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

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

Another blog mentee

As I mentioned before I've offered to mentor some nascent OU bloggers. Patrick McAndrew was first (I'm being lenient on him as he's been on holiday, but now we start!). Next up is Will Woods. This is just by way of shaming them in to action.

And following on from my previous post, while I'm on a Scoble love-in here is an excellent slideshow on creating a killer blog from him and Maryam (it's nearly a year old now, but still a goodie), which I sent to Will and Patrick as starting advice.

This week's blog sport - Scoble bashing

Now if there's one person who doesn't need my support it's Scoble, as Kathy Sierra has said 'Scoble can handle it.' But this week's attacks on Scoble have been interesting to watch since they say both good and bad things about the blogosphere.

Firstly, Scoble's crime for those who don't know, was to post a video where he argued that "Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook are going to kick Google's butt in four years". From what I can understand he is just plain wrong in some of the statements he makes (Danny Sullivan has a detailed long post on what's wrong with his argument - he's right, but he's angry!). Secondly, he allowed his enthusiasm to be used as a marketing tool for Mahalo.

The response was quite vitriolic. If you don't know much about search engines the level of rancour might strike you as slightly out of perspective, but software does that to people. Here are some of the responses:

• Adario Strange of Wired
• Stowe Boyd
• Valleywag

There is a barely concealed element of schadenfreude here - Scoble is prominent, a blatant self-publicist and makes bold statements (and he worked for Microsoft). People have been waiting for him to trip up, and have jumped on it when he has. I confess, I like Scoble - I often disagree with him, but he provides insight into a lot of the tech companies, has strong opinions, is often insightful and (not to be underestimated) has a sense of humour. Scoble's reaction has been interesting too - he listed most of the negative reactions, argued against some of them, and then admitted he had made mistakes.

The episode highlighted a few things to me:

i) Although there was a lot of vitriol in the responses, there was also a lot of considered thought and argument. It may be robust and confrontational at times, but this type of debate is what the blogosphere is about.

ii) Look how quickly the whole thing was raised, debated, assessed and then resolved. Less than a week. Academic publishing would still be reviewing the first article. It might not publish it on the grounds that Scoble was wrong, but that would remove a lot of the interesting debate from the public domain. I never knew I wanted to know about the particular workings of different search engines, but it turns out I did!

iii) I haven't tried Mahalo, but I have installed Ligit, and it seems to me that the  core of Scoble's argument, that human, social networked facilitated search will begin to compete with the automated power of Google. It may be that certain types of searches are better conducted this way, and I agree to say that these and Facebook will be a Google killer is pushing it, but nevertheless we should be thinking about different ways search will be performed. These will be determined by the type of knowledge we seek to find. For instance if I want to find a consultant to produce some Flash animations in education, I could use Google, but KnowledgeBook in Facebook, or a search in LinkedIn might be a better bet. 

iv) As I mentioned to an outsider the debate looks very technical and about small details (a directory is not a search engine), and all this is rather reminiscent of the very fine hair-splitting we see amongst religious sects. They may have 90% of their beliefs in common, but will argue (and sometimes fight to the death) over very small details. Proximity sometimes breeds contempt. Take football teams for example, Spurs fans don't hate Barcelona fans because they have less in common with them, they hate Arsenal fans because they have more in common, and they see them every day.

Childcare, summer holidays and my neglected blog

This summer has been tough on the old blog, and it makes me realise I'm a fairweather kind of blogger. We've had a couple of holidays, and I think divorce would loom if I were to say, 'do you mind if I blog while we sip our G and Ts?'. And when not working we've been juggling childcare. My day usually goes something like: the morning I work, while daughter watches TV/plays with toys/gets frustrated with playstation; in the afternoon we go out and do something child oriented; in the evening my wife takes over and I do some more work.

This means I can just about keep up with work, and seeing the contortions other parents get themselves in to over the summer holidays, it makes me appreciate the flexibility of my job and employer. But it doesn't leave much room for anything else, and so this blog has suffered. This has been partly because I haven't had the time to write anything, but also because I haven't had the time to stay connected. I haven't looked in my Google reader for over a week now, and feel slightly nervous about doing so, like when you know you've spent too much money and don't want to look at your bank balance.

I thought I would keep the blog going better over the summer, but it has shown me you need to maintain momentum, and once you lose that the inertia required becomes considerable. I guess this demonstrates what kind of blogger I am (despite my 81% addicted to blogging score recently). It also made me wonder whether it's worth blogging over the summer, since many other people are in the same position (my aplogies, this is a northern hemisphere bias here, to Southern hemisphere bloggers it's not a downtime at all). You could write the killer blog post and it'd be lost amongst all the 'Mark all as read' clicking everyone does when they return to their bulging RSS feeds.

One last thing - despite not actually blogging for a while, I have been thinking about it. In Majorca, at a water park (which was like hell, but wet) I was mentally composing a posting while queuing for a slide. When I was at Gullivers World in Milton Keynes, I had a good idea for a posting on Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. In the car driving to Cornwall, I put together some thoughts on digital culture, web 2.0 and the nature of expertise. Alas, never to be posted. Is there such a thing as blog angst I wonder?

Virtuous circles - a blogging quiz

A 'how addicted to blogging are you' quiz available here, which of course, anyone who is addicted to blogging will take and then blog about (via What counts). You can't stop this stuff even if you want to. This is a promotional aid for an online dating service, which has nothing to do with blogging, but they know what we're suckers for. I didn't want to blog about it, but felt compelled to. It's not as good as my connected academic quiz though.

81%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Mingle² - Dating Site

Becoming a blog mentor

As part of my mission (that may be aggrandising it somewhat) to promote blogging in the OU, I have offered to be a blogging mentor to three or four colleagues. The idea is to help them become regular, stable bloggers. They will then promote it to others and soon the whole world will blog! What do you mean pyramid schemes are dodgy?

Anyway, I have no idea what I mean by being a blogging mentor, so we'll have to make it up as we go along. If anyone has done something similar I'd really appreciate any tips. My plan is to be open about it, hence this posting, and to encourage them. I figure if I name them here that will be a motivation to continue for a while anyway.

First out of the blocks is Patrick McAndrew. Patrick has had a few attempts at blogging before, most notably with OCHRE. This was a semi-official blog for the evaluation strand of the openlearn project. I'll let Patrick say more about why he didn't blog as much as he would have liked with this - I think official blogs can feel a bit limiting both in scope ('can I talk about my cats?') and style ('can I make jokes?'), which makes you less inclined to post to them.

Patrick's new blog is here:  http://openpad.wordpress.com/ If he doesn't post at least twice weekly, we'll be after him...

Books, playlists and the granularity of ideas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogging the course design process - leftovers and sausages

I've mentioned this in passing before, but it deserves a full posting I think - my colleague James Aczel is keeping a blog as he chairs the production of a new course in our Masters in Online and Distance Education. The course is H809, "Practice-based research in educational technology", and the title was even voted on by readers and students. I would like to see more courses keeping blogs during the design phase, because a) it might help create a buzz around the course before it starts, b) it acts as a useful resource once the course has started and c) it probably aids the design process itself if you have to explain and reflect upon it.

There are two views on this. The first is that, like James, you should make the process open. Another colleague of mine has commented that the course production process sometimes feels like a big feast where we have all these great ideas and discussions, and then what we give students are the leftovers. While I think that's a bit of an extreme way of putting it. Most OU courses are not light on content, so if it is leftovers, it's a lot of leftovers, but he means intellectually I suppose. Keeping a blog is one way of inviting everyone to the feast.

The other view is that the design process is a filtering one. While we may have lots of great discussion, we also have a lot of needles digression also. What the final course represents is not some much leftovers but finally crafted perfection. Continuing our food analogy, course production is like making sausages - you can enjoy the end product but seeing how they're made would really put you off.

I'm going to take a middle route between these - part of what we do as educators is devise our best guess about what students will need and want. This is the finished course. But increasingly we are appreciating that one size doesn't fit all (education may be the last bastion of this approach), and exposing the process at least helps broaden your perspective. Keeping a blog represents a good middle route too I think - James is being open about the design process, but he will also filter what he blogs about (he's not going to write "X spent half an hour talking rubbish again today", for instance). I would hesitate to make blogging a compulsory part of producing a course, since then it just becomes a burden, but if it does turn out to help the process or recruitment, then I'd certainly encourage it. 

A technorati double life

I am not obsessed by my Technorati ranking (okay, maybe a little), but as I struggle to get my authority increased I was puzzled to see that this blog is listed twice. One I have claimed, but one unclaimed with a higher authority. It turns out this is a problem arising from how Typepad handles domain names. Sadly my authority is not the sum of these two. I can ask Technorati to combine them I think, but more simply I'll claim the later. In technorati now you have to create a blog post with some code in it. So here it is - I just couldn't bring myself to post nothing though: Technorati Profile

PS trying to increase authority is the story of my life - the other day I was lecturing my daughter on something and she smiled and said quite genuinely, 'dad, you're so funny.' And she's only five, what chance do I have when she's a teenager.

What value is blogging to your organisation

Today I received an email with an offer to become a paid blogger for Wide Open Education (I'm sure they approached a few people simultaneously).  They, very wisely, want to raise their profile in the blogosphere and were happy to pay someone a reasonable sum to do this. It would be impolite to say how much, not a full salary certainly, but a reasonable amount for someone who could do it as a by-product of their day job. I said no, because although I post on open content and open source, it isn't my main field of interest and so to keep up the volume of posts required I felt it would interfere with my regular job too much. They've got someone now (so don't go sending your CV off), who they probably approached before me as he is a much better choice (I'm not being coy about who it is, but I think they should be allowed to announce it first).

Anyway, this made me realise two things:

i) there is actual, real spendable money to be had in blogging, but you wouldn't set out on it as a career path.

ii) More interestingly the figure they offered gives me at least a benchmark as to how much an organisation values getting a presence in the blogosphere. And they recognise this doesn't come about by just posting lots of corporate news items, but by having thoughtful, interesting pieces that people want to link to (I know what you're thinking - so why'd they go to you then?).

This second point has the virtue of good timing - next week I have my annual work review. I am intent on establishing blogging as a valid academic activity and also one that has strategic and reputational value for the university. I now have a hard figure I can take to my review (they like such things) and say 'look, this is how much someone is willing to pay for the level of blogging activity I currently provide for free' (well, sort of free, it isn't part of my workplan and as such isn't accounted for in my time, but it does arise from work I am paid to do, and sometimes during work hours).  It's not so much that I want financial recompense for it (although, I don't sniff at such things), but more the recognition that it's an activity that should be acknowledged and not something with a vague whiff of 'not doing proper work' about it.

I'll let you know how my 'make blogging valid' campaign goes.