The Ed Techie

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

Technorati - grounds for divorce

	Elbow - Grounds for Divorce
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	Found at skreemr.com

(play song while reading)

Technorati has always had it's problems, but like in any relationship, you can overlook them for a while. However, they've been adding up lately, and I think we've reached the stage of irreconcilable differences. Here are the grounds for divorce:

1. It's broken - speaking just as this user, I know it doesn't work reliably. Exhibit A) - my authority hasn't changed for 20 days and even if I ping it manually, it still says 20 days ago. Exhibit B) - there are several people who I know have linked to me that don't show up in Technorati. As it works by calculating the linked references to your blog, this renders it pretty hopeless. Exhibit C) - my authority when it was working seemed to fluctuate randomly. There was a two months period where it dropped from around 160 to the current 79.
2. It is pre-Twitter - Technorati works on references from other blogs. The problem is that a lot of the referencing has moved on to Twitter (and Friendfeed, etc) now. A lot of that quick linking people used to do in short blog posts they now do via microblogging. And Technorati isn't picking these up (is this because of the use of shortened urls, or just that it doesn't look at Twitter accounts?). It's therefore operating with only half the information.
3. It lacks granularity - there isn't even an education channel. By lumping us all in together a small, individual blog is 'competing' with output from large companies with teams of writers. Take a look at the Technorati top 100 and you'll see that they are mostly either online magazines or professional bloggers. This is fine, but it needs a layer of categorisation over it to become meaningful.
4. It measures the wrong thing - this isn't really Technorati's fault, more an issue of the blogosphere. I would like to do, or find, research that confirms this, but my hunch is that what people link to is different, or at least not necessarily the same as, what they find interesting and valuable. People often link to funny stuff, or technical tips. Some of the posts that I have gained the most links to have been short ones that say 'I found technology Y, it looks interesting.' Others might link to this and say 'I found this (via Martin)...'. But your 2000 word discussion on Wittgenstein gets less linklove. However, it may still be useful and relevant to people. This is particularly problematic for higher education where you want to promote the Wittgenstein skits and not the tech trainspotting.
5. It's subject to gaming - all too easily really. As it measures link references the best thing to do is to engage in a real ding-dong fight with someone, preferably someone with a higher authority than you. This gets good links.

Now, you could say, 'who cares?'. Tony often chastises me for mentioning Technorati as he thinks it's all about ego (before pointing out that his rating is higher than mine ;)). But my interest has always been about whether such bottom-up metrics have a place in the world of the digital scholar, and Technorati has been the exemplar for these. If we have to consign Technorati to the tech bin then the question arises: does this mean any such approach is fundamentally flawed or do we need better metrics?

Doug Clow (who is rapidly becoming a digital scholarship guru) gave a talk recently where he concluded that we can really only rely on peer review. I don't fully agree - I think as scholars peer review will be the main component when assessing a colleague's contribution (say, for promotion), but given all the rich data we have online, surely there must be some reasonably reliable use we can make of it to at least add to the mix. I think PostRank, for example, does a better job of measuring your impact, although some of the same criticisms still apply.

So, I won't give up on metrics completely, but me and Technorati - we're through.

Microsoft, Apple and the Triumph of Love

<Image: There's nothing you can do that can't be done by anth - http://flickr.com/photos/anth3000/2582043116/>

Here's a question you've probably never pondered: why didn't Microsoft invent iTunes? It's not as dumb as it sounds, after all with their MSN network Microsoft had a global media platform which they were seeking to exploit as a content delivery route. And they had the financial and political clout, they could have wrapped up the music market in the way Apple have. Ask yourself this: If you had to place a bet back in 2001 on which company would have online music locked down, which one would you have bet on?

It's not like MS tried and failed, they didn't really try in this sector. But it would have been sensible for them and more importantly, why did Apple succeed so spectacularly? There are, of course, lots of reasons, but here's my short answer: Love.

Clay Shirky has talked about love with regards to software development and he's right - we underestimate it. So what's it got to do with Apple and Microsoft? The key is that people love Apple, in a way they never love Microsoft. I quite respect Microsoft (pre-Vista anyway), and have none of the idealogical angst that others hold against them, but I don't love them, and I don't know anyone who professes that. There is no Microsoft evangelist of the likes of Douglas Adams or Guy Kawasaki. There was a time when it looked as if all this affection wouldn't matter, indeed it may be a hindrance.  In the 1990s it seemed that sure, people loved Apple products, but they used Microsoft ones, in the same way people loved local shops, but went to supermarkets. It began to look as though Apple had lost the battle for good.

Without retracing all the history, Jobs comes back and Apple gets its mojo back. But this is not so much about the boss, but the type of employees an organisation attracts. The reason Apple succeeded with iTunes and the iPod is because it had attracted staff who fundamentally loved Apple products and loved well designed artefacts. Sharepoint may be a good, functional product but it's never going to attract that kind of person, and so as an organisation the 'gene pool' of innovation you have to draw on is weaker.

Maybe you think it only applies to physical objects? Not so, let's consider Google. They represent the most innovative company around at present (and given the rate of innovation possible in a digital world, maybe the most innovative company ever). Why? Sure it's because they're rich and that buys you smart people, but I'd suggest that more fundamentally it's because they attract staff who find what they are doing exciting.

In 1930 Fisher proposed a model of sexual selection that allowed for 'runaway' features - the peacock's tail exists because the preference for an average than longer tail is also inherited, and we have a positive feedback loop. Google seem to have manufactured a similar process with regards to innovation - there is a highly competitive environment where 'innovation' is the factor that is being 'selected', and they have a positive feedback loop. This is what any tech company surely seeks to realise.

The Apple and Microsoft wars are old news, so does this have any relevance now? Well, I was going to argue that (yes I know it's a dead term but you know what I mean by it) web 2.0 APIs and the general openness movement has seen something of a democratisation of this love and its expression. Because you can build on top of existing services you don't have to be an Apple engineer now to be engaged with a tool you love - Twitter and its myriad applications is an example.

But maybe the credit crisis will change all that. I'd say this though, it was having staff who genuinely loved their product that saw Apple through its dark days. In education terms, a lot of universities have that kind of affection and respect from their staff (I know the OU does certainly), but they don't always have the culture of innovation we've seen with Apple and Google, and maybe it's that combination you need.

But for now, with the global dominance of iTunes and Apple we can say that sloppy old love triumphed - that's rare, and we should cherish that.

Shiny show 2

Following on from the hugely irrelevant Shiny Show 1, I bring the next instalment, where I look at any new technologies that have crossed my path and evaluate them from an educational perspective. The usual proviso that some of these may not be that new, it's just when I get to them.

Odadeo - a social network site for dads. It is built around the concept of 'pledges', eg 'I pledge to be more patient', or 'I pledge to take my daughter to see High School bloody Musical 3'. You can then 'pip' your pledges when you do something towards them. You can share pledges and there is a 'Dadsdaq' which shows your progress. I like the way it gets you to define yourself according to various labels (you can invent your own tags), and then find others in those groupings. My concern was that it would be populated by either a) angry Fathers for Justice types or b) American dads who kept crying every ten minutes and hugging each other. But it's not, and is quite a fun place. If you're a dad, check it out.
What's more interesting for me though is if you replaced pledge with 'learning pledge' you've suddenly got the makings of a good learning social network site.
Shiny score - 4/5 Educational score - 2/5

PostRank - I covered this in detail in my previous post, but want to include it for a shiny award too. They get a shiny for their widget alone, see the left hand column on my blog. I think this way of measuring engagement with content is something we need to explore as educators (to help students) and under the digital scholarship banner, as a means of demonstrating the type of response and value there is to your online output.
Shiny score - 3/5 Educational score - 4/5

Shelfari - a social network for book readers. It takes the bookshelf idea from Facebook a little further, so you add books from an extensive database to your 'bookshelf' (I've added a couple to mine as illustration). This can be shared with others, and you can join groups, meet authors, etc. It's well done, and books are a subject people are passionate enough about to make a network viable. Books are sufficiently rich social objects to foster community.
From an educational perspective, like with Odadeo, you could see this being adapted to work around subject areas, or rather the user's bookshelf being imported into a learning environment so that they can join groups around other text books. Because you can tag books, it also adds to resource discovery for learners.
Shiny score - 4/5 Educational score - 4/5

Debategraph - takes the concept mapping idea and wikifies it. It looks nice, and being able to share maps and argument structures clearly has educational potential, but I found it difficult to use. Like a lot of concept mapping tools, it has a range of terminology (for example all the different nodes and types of links), that produce a high threshold to entry. They need to simplify I think, at least on the first play, so you can quickly bash together a mind map, without needing to take a course in mind map theory first. This is in competition rather with the Open University's own Cohere. There is definitely something in this shared maps for education, you can imagine them being legitimate forms of output, or group process, but the software isn't quite there yet.
Shiny score - 3/5 Educational score - 4/5

That's it for now folks, and remember - keep it shiny.

Shiny Show

In the first of an occasional series I offer up Shinies to the following tools, as potentially interesting in higher education:

TwitterFountain - oooh, shiny. Picked this up via a tweet from Brian Kelly. It aggregates tweets and flickr photos that have been given a specified hashtag, in a nice visual interface. Educationally, it's just a nice way of aggregating some feeds that can be embedded in a page. So, a course might decide upon a hashtag and in their course page (WPMU?) have a twitter fountain running. Not sure it adds much pedagogically, but it provides a stimulus for conversation. One problem - it will pull in any flickr photo with the tag, so my initial idea of having twitter fountains displayed around the OU is probably not a good idea as some wag would doubtless think it's a great laugh to take photos of their private parts and post them with the #OU tag.
Shiny score - 4/5 Educational score - 2/5

Tweetstats - bit old, but was thought of it the other day when I wondered 'what times of the day to I usually tweet at?' (sad, this is the kind of thing I wonder about). Here is the answer for me, I tend to tweet during the morning, and not much at weekends and during August, when I'm on holiday which shows I do have something resembling a real life. Tony and Alan Cann are the people I do most replies to and Thursday is my Tweetest day of the week. Educationally it's not advanced statistics but does help show the different types of communicators you may have in a group.
Shiny score - 3/5 Educational score 2/5

Xtranormal - ok, I've already blogged this, it's a tool that lets you create short animated movies very quickly. Good fun and very quick to get the hang of. After I'd done one, Patrick, Glyn and Nigel also shared their quick efforts, to demonstrate the point. If one begins to thing of a course not as a collection of content that is given to students, but an aggregation of different types of media they produce, then getting them to use Xtranormal will both make something fun for them, and because they have to really think about the subject to produce a movie, be educationally beneficial. Alan Levine has already mentioned it as another way of 50 ways to tell a story.
Shiny score - 4/5 Educational score 4/5

Platform - bit incestuous this one, the Open University launched it's Drupal based social platform for students, called, Platform. This is the work of colleagues such as Stuart Brown, nothing to do with me (hence it works). Tony has, of course, already blogged it. This is the successor to the OU's student newspaper, Sesame, so what is interesting for me is the combination of top-down and bottom-up mix. The communications team will be finding stories and publishing and at the same time we'll be looking for students (and alumni) to engage with it and share content and stories. What will be interesting is whether 'OUness' is a strong enough bond to tie people together in a community. But the approach seems right and it's not just a bunch of print stuff stuck online, they've really engaged with new media.
Shiny score 3/5 educational score 4/5

Now, I really must go and create some shiny badges...

SatNav - a microstudy in digitisation

<Image Mapa antiguo de America del Sur - thejourney1972>

We have only recently got a SatNav system for the car (it's invaluable if you are towing a caravan, no matter how small and trendy, as doing 3-point turns is not easy, or popular). Using it has made me reflect on how the process of digitisation and connectivity changes behaviour and our relation to certain artefacts. I think what is true of SatNav and maps, is probably true across all forms of content.

Here are the changes as I see them:

1. The need for a particular skill (in this case map reading) which was previously thought essential becames largely irrelevant.
2. This democratises the behaviour for use by nearly all member of society (navigation).
3. The skill becomes highly specialised then, and possibly as a result, highly valued when it is needed.
4. We gain in functionality because the community can create content - we have map mashups, numerous filters placed on maps, regular updates, recommended routes, new voices (Darth Vader "You have reached the dark side), etc.
5. The presence of the tool begins to alter behaviour. A small example, but when driving in France over the summer, we were more likely to explore because we could put in a destination, or a place of interest and not have to be concerned how we would get back to our original destination - the SatNav will do that for us. It has also removed the need to shout at each other while wrestling with a map.
6. We lose some of the richness and affection that is attached to a physical artefact, particularly with a history, in this case, maps - these are a thing of romantic wonder. Authors will not write of SatNav systems:

"when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my  finger on it and say, 'When I grow up I will go there.'"

Quick play with xtranormal

Tony pointed me at Xtranormal (and the CogDog reminded me that Tony had pointed me at it). It's a service that allows you to create little movies, adding in dialogue, camera angles, music, expressions, etc.

So, while having my ham sandwich for lunch I had a quick play and produced the following. It's not very good, but you get the idea:

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A better one is this take on FightClub.

Documentally is waki

The other day social media journalist documentally was invited by Reuters to attend Gordon Brown's press conference. Being a streaming video kinda guy (to put it mildly), he streamed live via Qik:

This went around on Twitter, and I tuned in. It occurred to me that I wouldn't have bothered to watch it live on TV, so why did I watch this time?

Partly it was out of curiosity, this being one of the the first times social media type journalists have been in on a big, proper news event (ie a non-techie one). So I wanted to see what it was like.

But there was also an element of feeling more connected to the events. It seemed more like a personal invitation to tune in (I don't know Documentally, aka Christian, but a few of the OU folks do). This made me reflect that we have become rather distant from traditional journalists. Because you engage much more in a dialogue and the everyday aspects of a social media journalist, one can view them as your representative.

Creating a character that acts as the audience's representative, or a proxy for the reader in literature, is a common enough tactic. In Shakespeare, Falstaff and the Fool (in Lear) perform this function, and in Japanese theatre the secondary role of waki is often seen as the embodiment of the audience. I'm not an expert in journalism, but it seems to me that social media provides a means of increasing this relationship with the audience. This can be true even with 'conventional' journalists - for example if the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones tweets that he is appearing on the news, I'm probably more likely to tune in and watch it, because I've been following his process in creating the story.

Ed Tech posters - come get 'em

I'll do a slidecast of my broadcast talk in a few days, but thought I'd share a couple of the images I adapted from Flickr photos. They'll soon be adorning student bedroom walls everywhere.

(Original image Kent Wang - We must liberate Taiwan: http://flickr.com/photos/kentwang/34405544/sizes/o/)

And this one inspired by Brian Kelly's talk where he suggested we all have an inner geek, called Ellis:

 

(Original image Mattham - Yoda Dog Costume: http://flickr.com/photos/matthamm/285952194/)

And from my content video, James Boyle's  Internet Holy Trinity:

 

(Original image Zen - Fog birds telephone wire close: http://flickr.com/photos/zen/1209773/

Quote is John Perry Barlow)

(original image Guille - Freedom http://flickr.com/photos/cguille/2556176764/

Quote is Stewart Brand)

(Quote is John Gilmore)