The Ed Techie

Twitter is your IT support

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/7172953614/>

This post isn't intended as a criticism of anyone, rather an observation on a trend I've noticed from several others also. 

I'm running my block of the Masters course H817 as a MOOC. It'll start this March, and one of the things I wanted is a DS106 style blog aggregator. That is, I want the contributors to register their blog, and for posts they tag appropriately to repost automatically in the course blog.

Now, the sensible way to do this seems to be to install WordPress and use the FeedWordPress plug-in. For reasons I won't go in to, I haven't been able to get this done at the Open University, despite trying since last July. I've spoken to people at others unis and it isn't isolated to the OU, it seems to be this low-level, experimental type of IT support is increasingly difficult to find.

Do you know who I think the culprit is? The VLE. As universities installed VLEs they became experts at developing enterprise level solutions. This is serious business and I have a lot of respect for people who do it. The level of support, planning and maintenance required for such systems is considerable. So we developed a whole host of processes to make sure it worked well. But along the way we lost the ability to support small scale IT requests that don't require an enterprise level solution. In short, we know how to spend £500,000 but not how to spend £500.

With time pushing on, I got some local support in IET (thanks Will), and investigated the best options. It became clear that hosting externally would be the easiest option. I asked on Twitter who the best hosting solutions were and got a great set of responses. Alan Cann suggested siteground and sent me a friend's introduction offer, so I signed up with them. In 10 minutes I'd followed their WordPress installation, installed WP, found the FeedWordPress plug-in and installed that too. The blog is here: h817open.net

My next problem was to get registration to work. I looked at what DS106 have done, and in response to a request on Twitter, Alan Levine pointed me to this solution from Martha Burtis. That was a bit beyond my coding skills. So I created a simple Google Form and embedded it in my blog. I then asked Martin Hawksey if he knew how to take a Google form output and turn it into an OPML file as FeedWordPress allows you to create a list of syndicated sites from an OPML file. He pointed me to this service, which does just that.

He and Tony also suggested some solutions which will help with autodiscovery (ie finding the feed for the blog if someone just enters their main URL). Martin lists some options here. I haven't quite cracked this yet, so it needs people to enter their feed url, which isn't ideal, so I'll keep working on this.

So, I think I have a working solution. If you have time, could you try it for me by registering your blog here and then posting something which has the tag #h817open. Only posts with this tag should appear. You can just do a test post, but perhaps more interestingly you could respond to the idea of whether "openness has won" or not with a post "Openness has (hasn't) won because..."

This took me about an afternoon. The problem is that it's quite a flaky solution, the OPML service could disappear, I don't really know if it will work for all blogs, and there's no support. So it could go down and I've got no backup. More worryingly I am at the edge of my expertise here, so I can't really do much more. So a university supported proper grown-up solution would be preferable. On the other hand, one of the things I frequently say is that the best thing we can teach our students is how to be good members of a network. And this is a clear demonstration of why I believe that. I think this tension between the innovative possibilities of new technology and the understandably cautious nature of institutional IT services will mean that we'll all need to do more of this DIY tech set-up and experimentation. And the only way to do that is to have a good network who can help.

One last plea - I joked with Alan that I needed DS106 out of a box. I think I'm serious though - it would be great to have a step by step, idiots guide to installing and setting up a DS106-like environment. The rest of us don't have Alan and Jim's tech skills, so getting to the starting line is difficult. I know they'll say you should invent your own way, but they done so much great work that I don't think they realise just how much expertise they have. A simple installation that let the rest of us get started, would mean we could all go off in different directions then. So any of the DS106 crowd up for it? And I do mean a simple guide, it has to be Weller-proof.

 

Be the Sat Nav

Our metaphors for human behaviour are often informed by technology, and the metaphors we adopt play an important role in how we see the world. Lakoff and Johnson argue that "If... our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor."

But can you consciously choose metaphors to shape your own behaviour? This is part of the argument of talking therapies, that you change your interaction with the world by the way you frame it conceptually. All of which is trying to provide some academic justification for a small idea in a small post...

I was pondering this the other day, when I got lost and my sat nav was patiently trying to guide me somewhere, although I thought it had got it wrong. The beauty of the sat nav is that it has no memory. It doesn't care that it told you turn around when possible, or that it said turn left and you turned right. It calculates purely from the present. It doesn't give up in a huff and say "well, if you're just going to ignore me, what's the point?" This is reassuring when you're driving, you need to know it doesn't matter what has gone before, it can navigate you anywhere from this point.

In life, having memory is generally a good thing (we wouldn't have evolved it otherwise). But there are times when being able to 'be the sat nav' and take it forward only from the present and forget the past is useful. Personally, I'm a person who can bear grudges. There is a blogger I still haven't forgiven because they once quoted me and inserted [sic]. They were correct to do so, I had made a grammatical error, but I interpret [sic] as [I'm smugly superior to this person]. I should let it go. I should be the sat nav.

So, if you find a relationship is blocked because you can't forgive a minor misdemenour (I'm not suggesting you should forget if someone has stolen your car and emptied your bank account), then breathe deep, say the mantra 'I am the sat nav' and then say 'at the next interaction, go straight on'. Or something equally zen like.

PS - I also don't forgive people who don't say thankyou when you let them through in traffic, who don't put the 'next customer' indicator down for you in supermarket queues, who use 'literally' incorrectly... ok, it's going to take some practice.

The cost of good bad ideas

There's a horror film, which I've never seen, called The Human Centipede (if you've never heard of it, I apologise for bringing it to your attention). Now, I like a horror film, but I really don't want to see this one. But here's the thing: the mere existence of the idea that the film contains has given me disturbed nights. In some respects the director deserves credit for this - he has conceived of an idea and then put it into a film, which you don't even need to see to give you nightmares. That's the power of a bad idea.

I was thinking about this the other day in relation to Digital Natives. Of course, there's nothing horrific about the digital natives idea, but like that film, its has kind of infected a lot of educational thinking merely by its existence. 

If you haven't read the studies, most people now think the central ideas in digital natives are, in a word, bogus. There are no real differences between generations, attributable to technology. There are differences between how we used to do stuff and how we do it now. But digital natives (or if you prefer net gen) is largely a myth. In this book Marc Prensky says it was meant as a metaphor and people took it too seriously. Maybe. And maybe there's some back pedalling going on.

But here's a question: how much money has been spent on the idea of digital natives over the years? There have been innumerable keynotes from people proclaiming themselves experts in the area; schools, universities and companies have shelled out for consultants to advise them on how to deal with this strange new breed; we have yards of publications on the matter; then there are the research projects looking at whether it exists or not (for example, my colleague Chris Jones led a very good project in this area); and by no means least there are all those essays, theses and dissertations which take it almost as a given fact.

That's like a mini-industry centred around an idea that had a kind of fashionable appeal, but no real basis in evidence. And what of the opportunity costs? While we were fretting about whether they existed or not and what we should do about it, did we miss seeing what was really happening and the more interesting and subtle changes in society in general. And that's a shame because it's not a competely bad idea - many of us feel instinctively that our children are growing up in a different world than we were, but then we're operating in that world too. The age element made the argument attractive ("these kids are completely different!") whereas the interesting thing was how technology was making it different for everyone. Highlighting changes needed in the education system to deal with this new technology context were a good thing, but wrapping it up as a generational shift missed the point about the different groups and attitudes across all generations. 

My favourite Net Gen nonsense quote is from Oblinger and Oblinger who claimed as one of the defining characteristics of the net generation that “they want parameters, rules, priorities, and procedures … they think of the world as scheduled and someone must have the agenda. As a result, the like to know what it will take to achieve a goal. Their preference is for structure rather than ambiguity.”

Are they comparing this with evidence of a preference for ambiguity and lack of structure in previous generations? That statement seems almost like a horoscope - vague enough to be true of anyone. 

I suppose critics of blogging and the like might point to the fact that the idea didn't generate from a peer-reviewed academic journal, which would have filtered out some of the claims. We could chalk one up for the peer-review system here, and note that popularity and linking is not evidence of rigour and value.

So beware the next good bad idea you come across in relation to ed tech (or horror films), a nice soundbite idea that seems to capture a feeling of the times can lead you off down false paths for years. 

 

Jobs weather

Like many, I was saddened at the death of Steve Jobs yesterday, and inevitably it led to some reflection on the impact of a person's life.

In 1999 I wrote part of a course (T171, You, your computer and the Net), based around the story of the early computer industry. We used Cringeley's Accidental Empires as a set text. Ultimately this came down to a story of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Incidentally, this compelling narrative was a very good way to teach about dry subjects such as microprocessor operation, analogue to digital conversion, etc. At the time Jobs had just gone back to Apple, and it was by no means certain this would be a success. Many people were predicting the end of Apple and Microsoft were all conquering. Like football managers, the advice for company founders is usually "don't go back".

If Jobs had done nothing in this second phase at Apple, we would still be marvelling at his achievements, but that he made this second reign eclipse the first is really a remarkable achievement. Much of the eulogy yesterday focused on the number of people using his products, which I agree is testament to his success, but I think perhaps even more powerful is the long reach he had - the impact beyond immediate Apple products.

I saw a couple of snidey comments on forums along the lines of 'I don't see why it is the lead news on the BBC', and 'I don't use Apple stuff so he had no influence on my life.' To these people I'd say: if you don't think Steve Jobs had an impact on your life, then you simply don't understand the world you live in. (At least in the developed world, but arguably everywhere).

So what is this long reach of Jobs:

• Windows - Gates can be seen as the great democratiser of computers, but the Windows interface, which was key to this, was driven by competition with Apple. I'm not saying we'd still have DOS interfaces (and yes the original ideas came from Xerox PARC), but the Mac pushed it forward a good decade or so. Which leads us onto the next point:
• The Internet - now, you're probably thinking I'm stretching things here, and yes I know Jobs didn't invent the internet. But the work he did to create a world where the personal computer was ubiquitous laid the foundation for our whole internet driven economy. 
• Music and other sectors - I wrote a post once asking the question 'Why didn't Microsoft invent iTunes?'. By really grasping what the net meant for a digital content industry, Jobs completely transformed this industry. In so doing he also highlighted how other similar industries would be challenged by the arrival of digital content distributed via a global network (eg the film industry). As with the graphical interface, it may have happened eventually, but the music industry themselves weren't driving this change, so who knows how long it would have taken. 
• Economy models - iTunes is still the only really good example of making micropayments work, and as such it is often held up as a model for other sectors to immitate and explore. 

I could go on. My point is that Jobs' impact is not just that a lot of people have an iPad, but on the subtle ways his work pushed others and changed society. I should stress that I'm not a Fanboi and lots of Apple's products and approaches infuriated me. But we can view it like Adam Greenfield's analogy of network weather - even if you don't engage then it has an impact upon you, like the weather. Jobs weather can be seen in everything from the number of people using social media to report on an event (because they have easy to use mobile devices) to the closure of the record shop in your high street (because everyone buys their music online).

How many of us will be able to say our lives were like a 30 year global weather system?

Categorisation angst, the monoamorous and Google+

Yes, we're all playing with Google+, and I suspect blogging reactions to it, but this is not one of those posts (quick verdict: it's immediately better than Buzz/Wave, and Circles combined with Hangout could be very useful for research teams, institutions). No, what this post is about is the categorisation dilemmas that tools such as Google+ generate, and our relationship with technology.

In terms of categorisation my first dilemma was whether work colleagues count as 'friends'. I chatted to George Siemens about this and he concluded he didn't have friends, just colleagues (or colleagues who are also friends). I'm in a similar position, or at least my online self is. I do have some friends (some of whom are not imaginary), but they tend not to be the sort of people who'll be in Google+. And there are plenty of people I work with who I would also count as friends (such as George). And then there are people who I've never even met who I think of as friends (Jim Groom and Alan Levine for example). But friends is a very laden term, so do I want to recreate the Facebook definition, or reclaim it for 'special' people? Dunno.

And on this subject of this I am unsure which approach to take to adding people into Google+. When I started in Facebook I befriended anyone, but after a while I stripped this back to people I knew reasonably well. In Twitter I have a more open approach, although once I was following about 1000 people I stopped following back automatically. So do I want the wide or narrow network in Google+. Dunno yet.

Lastly, looking at Google+ brought to mind a post I did a few years ago, in which I argued that we are largely irrational in our choice of software, but often dress this up in terms of rational decision making around features. We have an emotional connection to software and tend to be loyal to one type. We are essentially monoamorous for categories of software, you're either a Facebook or Twitter person, a Blackboard or Moodle advocate, Flickr or Picassa freak, etc (you may have accounts in both, but you're loyalty will be with one or the other). As I argued then, it's like the team you support (in football or whatever) - the whole point of the attachment is to have only one (although it is acceptable to have more than one loyalty at different levels eg local team, main team, national team).

If you are launching a new software service then this monoamorous behaviour is significant - either the service needs to be better enough to lure people away or it has to be distinctive enough to constitute a different category. You can't rely on people wanting more than one service that does the same thing.

Which brings me back to Google+, sooner or later those of us who use these things intensively will have to go with one or the other. There will be cross-streaming so you can feed one from the other, but our attention and loyalty will be with one or the other. And in these kinds of businesses, it's attention that counts. 

Which leaves me with the big question - which one will win my affections? Definitely dunno.

Eportfolios - J'accuse

This is a bit kicking a man when he's down as most people have turned away from eportfolio software now, but it still persists. It's also old hat - Jim was telling us this ain't your eportfolio mama, three years ago. But maybe now is a good time to reflect. I would like to one day do a series of posts about collective fantasies that grip educational technology, and why they don't turn out the way we envisage (learning objects anyone?).

This post was set in motion by an email from a colleague asking whether I thought blogs were better means of achieving portfolios than specific eportfolio systems. I answered yes, but it set me thinking as to why I've always had an aversion to eportfolios. They can be seen as a case study of how educational technology gets it wrong, for the reasons below.

A key characteristic of these ed tech mass hysterias is that they're based on a good idea - an eportfolio sounds great. It will be a place to store all the evidence you gather to exhibit learning, both formal and informal, it supports lifelong learning, career development, etc. Who wouldn't want one of those? Unfortunately, the idea is too seductive and all encompassing, it becomes a panacea for many ills. Which leads to the first main problem.

Over-complication – because we are developing software to suit a range of stakeholders, feature creep becomes inevitable. The question of ‘how simple can we make it’ is not one that is usually asked. So for eportfolios we find we need new standards to export and move between institutions, ways of locking down items so they can be verified, means of providing different views for different audiences, etc. In a blog the answers to these problems are: RSS; is it important?; and tags respectively.

Institutional, not user focus – a related point is that we end up developing solutions that are sold or selected by institutions (see also LMSs). An institution has a very different set of requirements to an individual. However, if you want eportfolios to work, then it’s individuals that need to like them and be motivated to use them. This emanates from an institutional tic, which is the need to own and control systems and data.

Focus on the tool, not the skills – having developed our overly complex, institutionally focused tool, it now requires a good deal of training for students to use it, since it isn’t very intuitive, and they didn’t know they wanted it anyway. So it becomes a tool that is focused around a particular course, often with credit attached to it. In short it becomes a tool used inside education only. There is little focus on the more general skills which are actually the main benefits: sharing content, gathering and annotating resources as you go, becoming part of a network, reflecting on work, commenting on others, etc. In short, the sort of skills that make for a good blogger.

Lack of social element – the eportfolio often becomes institutionally branded and focused, and because it is has been designed by educational technologists who are probably a bit sniffy about all this social software business, doesn’t allow for much of the easy social elements found elsewhere. This can be functional (eg is embedding easy), but more often it is cultural – the culture of blogging is one of openness and reciprocity, whereas eportfolios are tied into a more academic culture of individualism, plagiarism and copyright. In this environment the social element does not flourish. 

Educational arrogance – maybe arrogance is too strong a term, but eportfolios demonstrate a common mistake (in my view) in educational technology, which goes something like “Here’s some interesting software/tool/service which does most of what we want. But it’s not quite good enough for higher education, let’s develop our own version with features X and Y”. In adding features X and Y though they lose what was good about the initial tool, and take a long time. Blogs are good enough for eportfolios, if what you want from an eportfolio is for people to actually, you know, use them. 

VCR as formative technology

Having done a couple of DS106 radio shows with Jim Groom (which suffered rather from, erm, technical difficulties), the notion of the early video cassette recorder as a formative technology has emerged for me.

Here are some ways in which I think it was relevant:

It changed the film industry - home video was seen as a threat by the film studios back in the early 80s, with the fear that it would mean people would stop going to the cinema. This didn't happen, and gradually they realised that it was another very lucrative form of income. Many decent films got a second life on video, and an awful lot of crap ones went straight to it. Ironically, it is the protection of DVD rental and sales (the very things they fought against) that the film industry seeks to protect against the new interloper, the internet.

It created a new kind of aesthetics - this is my attempt at justifying my penchant for B-movie horror, but I think, that just as, say Dire Straits seemed made for CD, and Gladiator for DVD, so those 80s horror films such as The Evil Dead, The Thing and CHUD seemed to be the right mix of platform and content. Carpenter's The Thing was panned when it was released as being over the top, but I think he understood the type of aesthetics that worked on VHS.

It acted as a social object - I was one of the first kids to have a VHS, and so people would regularly convene round my house to watch films. We developed a library, a shared repertoire of dialogue, and a culture around the movies that we could watch repeatedly. We still went to the cinema, but being to see your collection of movies over and over, created a different type of interaction between school-friends.

It gave the viewer control - this was the main thing, it first of all liberated us from TV schedules or cinema listings - you could rent the film you wanted and watch it when you determined. But also it gave us control over the viewing process. You could fast forward, rewind, slow mo and pause. There were many films which we would skip to favourite scenes in (eg fight scenes in The Warriors), and particular ones we would watch in slow-motion (the head exploding in Scanners). This meant we were watching films in an entirely different way from that which was intended. 

[UPDATE] The birth of read/write - I didn't include this originally, but Scott's comment below set me thinking. I didn't do much creating with the VCR, as cameras were still expensive, but on reflection, Scott is right to highlight this. Even by recording from the TV you began to make your own creation - for instance, I had one tape for artists on Top of the Pops, so over the years created my own compilation (I wish I still had that tape now). And in the late 80s a bunch of us hired a camera for a weekend and made a video for a friend's 21st, with a bunch of comedy clips and film pastiches. So, even if we didn't do much, this technology marked a significant change - that from consumer to producer, which is one that has come to define the modern age.

I think all of these have resonance with what we are seeing now with internet culture - the threat of new technology, loss of control, greater choice and democratisation of process. The home computer is often cited as the influential technology for today, but I reckon the VHS home recorder was more significant. It taught us how to play around, reinterpret and take control. And it had great big buttons you could operate with your toes.

(don't watch this clip of you're a bit squeamish)

Bavathursdays, messiness is part of the plan

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbanislands/3716274762/ by Viqi French>

Last night I joined Jim Groom for a live session on DS106 Radio. The idea was to chat about 80s b-movies, an interest we have in common and see where it went. It's fair to say it went all over the shop, but was really fun from our end anyway (I'm not sure how much fun it was for the listener). But on the basis that it's through playing and doing fun stuff that you actually learn, we're going to have a go again. Next time we'll try and get others involved and have a focus around a particular theme or film I think.

I created some fake adverts for a VLE/LMS sponsor, ZombieBoard ("Because learning is too serious to have fun"), which are here:

 

MW80sBrit- zombie1

MW80sBrit- zombie2

MW80sBrit- zombie3

If you want to hear two people struggling with technology, winging it a bit, and then being self-indulgent about John Carpenter films, then you can listen to the whole show here:

 

Download Bavathursdays-ep1.mp3

 

 

 

 

The year of the backlash

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/frippy/1419020309/ by Frippy>

This is hardly a marvel of prophecy, but bear with me...

The signs are that this year will be one marked by something of a backlash against social media/ web 2.0/ any internet stuff. I don't mean from the traditional media, who've always been suspicious, but from people who know what they're talking about and have been advocates. In other words, increasingly 'us lot' will be declaring that this stuff is peripheral, uncool, over- rated, etc.

I think this will often been focused on a particular technology, and Twitter will be the main candidate this year. I've already seen several people I know abandon it. But increasingly it reflects a disappointment that technology hasn't delivered on its promises, and that as it becomes incorporated into everyday life it begins to look like all the stuff it was meant to replace. Hey, e-mail was revolutionary once. This cycle of attitudes towards technology is neatly captured in the Gartner Hype cycle, which, while not founded in deep research, captures instinctively what many of us feel about technology.

The other thing to bear in mind is that as technology matures, so does the criticism that goes along with it. This moves from the tabloid 'it's evil' attitude to a more reasoned approach. I disagree with a lot of what Lanier says in You Are Not A Gadget (that's another post), but I agree when he says technology criticism should not be left to Luddites (and neither should technology engagement be left to the evangelists). So part of what we will see growing this year is smart people bringing their intellectual capacity to bear on their experience with technology.

I would caution though that many of us who are prone to technology enthusiasm are also guilty of excessive criticism (I include myself in this). Maybe it's a personality thing for early adopters. My point is we should be wary of going to extremes. To return to my earlier example, the fact that Twitter won't be the tool that brings down totalitarian regimes, or that you found yourself using it too much, or that it is often trivial does not mean it is therefore useless. I think we should avoid these kind of binary distinctions: it's a revolutionary force or it's pointless. I know that, for instance, my use of Twitter has changed from a compulsion to tweet at all times, to a much more regulated, measured use. I'll go days without using it, but on other days will dip in continuously and find it entertaining, useful, engaging. And that's the same for all of it - we tend to over-indulge and then find their real value as they settle into our daily lives.

I think a healthy caution has crept into our reaction to technology now: Buzz, Ping, Wave, Quora - all of these have been met with an appropriate questioning attitude and not a blind acceptance of the next big thing. But we should also not become adverse to what can be done using tools with a little imagination - ds106 radio is a recent example of this. The technology isn't particularly complex (well, it would be beyond me, but for someone like Grant it's probably not too complex), but when you make it easy enough and get the right mix of people together, magic happens.

So I'm starting the backlash against the backlash early - YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Twitter - these things are amazing. They're just not as amazing as we first thought, or rather, we're just beginning to find the ways in which they will be amazing.

The lack of uptake of new technology by researchers

Yesterday I gave a presentation for George and Stephen's open course PLENK. You can see the recording of the session here. The slidedeck is below:

Research, technology & networks

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

I have been writing a chapter on research and how researchers are (or rather aren't) using new technologies for my digital scholarship book. Several good surveys and reviews have been published recently looking at this, and the overall picture is a rather depressing one (see some references in my Mendeley list). While there are islands of innovation, generally researchers are making little use of new technologies and are very cautious and conservative in their adoption.

I talked about why this might be so and suggested the following reasons:

• The stranglehold of publishing - tenure and reward are still linked to publishing in academic journals, so spending time on other forms of communication is not directly encouraged. This is reinforced through research quality assessment exercises which are closely allied to publishing, such as the REF.
• Wasting new blood - related to the above, in other sectors new recruits are seen as the people who bring in new ideas. Yet in education because tenure is linked so closely to traditional outputs, new researchers are positively discouraged from spending time on other endeavours. So the very people who might engage in transforming practice are discouraged from doing so. This leaves it to tenured academics to engage in innovation, but these have mostly been successful through more traditional means so their history tells them to carry on this way. The pool of potential adopters then is decreased by the research context we have in place. I suggested this was quite a harmful environment to create.
• Antithetical to research ethos - I also put forward the suggestion that in science in particular, research is about predicting outcomes, and much of web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) is about unpredictability - you don't know what will happen with your outputs, or through a network.
• Research is the core practice - despite how much academics might say they value teaching, or public engagement, it is still research that is most highly valued. This means it is the area people are least willing to risk their reputation in and want to control most tightly.

I then suggested some themes that I thought were emerging, but that is for another post.

Of course one might argue it doesn't matter. Researchers will adopt new technologies if they are effective, and there is an underlying assumption in my talk that adoption is a good thing, which isn't necessarily true. This may well be the case, but there are three responses to this which at least bear consideration:

• The impact of the negative context - if research adoption of new technologies (and associated practices eg open publishing) is being impaired by the financial/reward structure we have in place, then we need to address whether that structure is doing research a disservice in the long term
• Powerful tools - I know through personal experience that even when people have been dismissive, or cautious of a particular tool, when it is demonstrated in the right context, or they appreciate its possibilities, then they will find uses for it in their academic work that I had never anticipated. This isn't true for everyone or for all uses, but it is worth chipping away at misconceptions and demonstrating potential.
• The role of the researcher - as higher education seeks to demonstrate its value to society, it strikes me that it is potentially dangerous not to be leading on the use and development of new tools, and particularly on what they mean for knowledge construction and sharing, rather than leaving it to others.