The Ed Techie

Your search is valuable to us

Tony was giving a talk yesterday as part of a workshop with me and Grainne, to the OU Library and he said something I hadn't really appreciated before - namely that because Google refines its search results based on your history (if you are signed in to Google), the results, say, that Tony gets will be different from the ones you or I get. I know it came out in 2005, I told you I was slow on the uptake.

This made me think that your search history is actually valuable, because the results you get back are a product of the hours you have invested in previous searches and the subject expertise in utilising search terms. So, if you are an expert in let's say, Alaskan oil fields, and have been researching this area for years, then the Google results you get back for a search on possible new oil fields will be much more valuable than the results anyone else would get.

There are a couple of interesting implications to this. Firstly, just as people who don't have the time will pay others to build up their characters for them in virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft, so the time you have invested in your search history may become a valuable commodity. Time is the commodity we don't have enough of, and anything that can only be realised through the investment of time has some value to someone.

Secondly, if you can assemble and utilise the expert search of a network of people, then you can create a socially powered search which is very relevant for learners. Want to know about really niche debates in evolution? We've utilised Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones and Matt Ridley's search history to give you the best results. Or if you prefer, the search is performed as the aggregation of a specialist community.

You can see how this would play in a SocialLearn type context - the benefit of belonging to the network is that you gain access to a collective search refinement. And in a Google World search almost equals  knowledge. Of course, this would require some means of you opening up your search history to be used by others, in a way that a) didn't reveal all of your searches (if you're an eminent historian you don't really want everyone to know the time you searched for 'Who is Paris Hilton?') and b) didn't corrupt your search data, in the same way as when you buy gifts for someone in Amazon and your recommendations get screwed. (Because I buy books for my parents I get recommended a range of London in the Blitz books - who knew there were so many?).

Anyone know if such a thing is in operation anywhere?

I was slow to get Qik

I'd seen a bit of chat about the video service Qik (mainly from Scoble's twitter feed), and AJ is always trying to get us converted to Seesmic, but I hadn't really been enthused, seeing at just another way of capturing video on the web. Then this week I had a chat with OU geek/EEE evangelist Liam and he wanted to show me Qik on the mobile.

So we had a qik go with it, and minor epiphany moment - of course, it's only when you see it in conjunction with mobile technology that it makes sense. Nearly everyone has video capability on their phones, but the problem is that it uses up memory. But Qik streams to their server, so you are not storing it locally. Now I get it! We're all broadcasters on the move now. The educational possibilities of this are intriguing, and we want to explore them for SocialLearn. As well as streaming events, I like the notion of using it as your own journal - recording half thoughts, ideas, tasks, etc and linking these to your goals. There are some nice touches, eg you can set it up to automatically post to Twitter, YouTube, etc

Never let it be said that I am qik on the uptake (ok, that's enough qik/quick puns). Here is the vid we shot when playing around:

A new way of giving?

My colleague, Juliette Culver, is involved in an interesting project called Operation Sleeper Cell. It's an online multi-user game, with challenges, puzzles, etc. Juliette describes it thus:

It’s free to play and there are puzzles, creative challenges, a story to follow, events in real life, and lots of top secret stuff that I’d love to tell you about but can’t. The game lasts ten weeks and there are new missions each week. If you enjoy things like treasure hunts, you should enjoy this I hope!

Nothing particularly new there (although it looks a good example of its genre). The really interesting part is that they've developed it for Cancer Research. You can donate directly, if you feel you're getting good value from the game, or buy cells in the grid to advertise.

This strikes me as a good example of several behaviours combining beneficially. It takes the open source motivation to be involved in an interesting project to get free developers, adds in the 'pay what you like' freakonomics model from Radiohead and others, mixes up the addictive elements of gaming and sprinkles with people's tendency to want to give to charity.

Who knows if it'll work, but it could be a real model of fundraising for the future. Of course, if they did a 'be a virtual educational technologist' one, then they'd be on to a real winner.

iTunes nonplus

I had a strange experience with iTunes Plus recently that left me scratching my head at the logic of DRM.

I was trying to create a playlist and realised an album I had bought a while ago wasn't in my library (Chet Baker Sings, if you're interested - it's melloooooooow). It must have been lost in transfers between laptops, so I went to the music store and went through the process of buying it again. In the past when this has happened it has notified me that I already own it and has let me download it again for free. This time however, it said I could download it from iTunes Plus at a discounted price (20p a track), BUT only if I also purchased all the other iTunes Plus tracks it had picked out for me at the same time. So, in order to get the bargain price, I had to spend £3o on tracks that I already owned. Yeah, like I'm going to do that. So for all the fanfare of DRM free music on iTunes plus, it seems to be yet another way of making you pay again for music.

And they wonder why people flock to BitTorrent...

I heart Wordle

Given my fondness for tag clouds, it's inevitable I would love Wordle - it generates word clouds from text you input. Nothing new there, but here's the catch - it's lovely. You can manipulate the text colour, orientation, layout, etc.

I'm not sure tag clouds always add value, but I think we could use them a lot more - for instance at the OU we do a lot of student surveys, often with a free form comment section for students to fill out. As a course team chair I would get back lots of data, plus all of the comments. Wading through these was difficult and time-consuming. A simple tag cloud of student comments would instantly highlight what the main issues were.

Apart from that, I think I am going to refuse to read any report that doesn't start with a nice tag cloud summary.

Here is one from a 30 page SocialLearn report I fed through Wordle. Doesn't tell you much, but is pretty:

LAMS 08 Animoto

Just playing with Animoto - here is a movie from the LAMS conference

Mac/Linux users look smug now

I got a laptop from work last year with Windows Vista installed. I don't use it much (I have a Vaio with XP which works fine), but it has become our media machine at home. Then yesterday it gave the message that the activation period had expired and this version of Windows was not valid. I tried entering the code on the sticker on the machine but no joy. I contacted tech guys at the ou who reckon I will need to plug it into the campus network for it to update. As I'm in Cardiff and in the US next week, this means it's at least a couple of weeks before it will be usable again. I asked if they knew this would happen, and was told no. I wonder if other organizations know about this 'feature' of Vista? I've always been reasonably pragmatic about Windows as an OS, if everyone else uses it, then I'm happy to. But not being able to access a legitimate copy is rather stretching my agnosticism. So finally it may be a case of Linux, here I come.

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!

It's just you

(via MLx) I love this - one of the founders of Twitter has created a service that allows you to check whether a service is down. It asks the simple question 'Is X down for everyone or just me?'

And then let's you know:

This saves you asking the question on Twitter, and often of, Twitter.

Google up your life

(Keso - http://flickr.com/photos/keso/108805307/)

It's official, my soul belongs to Google. At the risk of winning 'slowest person on the uptake' award, I have switched all my tools over to Google now. Inspired by my wife who got frustrated that she can't save to her own hard disk in her work and her allocated space runs out every month, and my own institutional frustrations, I decided to switch everything over to Google.

Here's what happened:

1) Email - set up a Gmail account if you haven't already got one. Go to Settings - Accounts - and click Add mail from another account. A pop up window comes up where you need to fill in your email server and port number for the POP3 server (I had to get these from our IT people). Then it chunks through them, pulling them in to your Gmail account, and clearing your old one. Under Settings - Accounts you can then set this to be your default account, so email appears to come from my OU account.

Result: Whereas I was continually over my mailbox limit, and had to delete messages in order to send a new one, I am now using 1% of my Gmail limit. Talk about orders of magnitude. Search is really fast too.

2) Calendar - I exported a cvs file from outlook and now have a calendar that is publicly shareable. I've not quite figured out how those in the OU outlook system will work with it.

Result: again no problems with space, but still haven't tested it in anger yet.

3) iGoogle - set up a page in iGoogle. I have three tabs: Work which I added the Gmail, calendar, RemembertheMilk, Google Talk, and Google Docs widgets to; Stuff which has things like Spurs news, Flickr photo of the day, weather, etc; Networks which has Twitter (via BeTwittered), Facebook, LogYourRun, the Technorati tab for links to this blog, Google Reader plus some bookmarks of other sites.

Result: Everything I need is in one place, with blurring between professional and personal. Who said PLE?

4) Docs - I use Google docs quite a lot anyway, but incorporating it with my main email and having it on my iGoogle page means it is now my default system. Only downside is that it doesn't allow docs over 500K.

5) Anything else - with this widget for iGoogle Your Page Here, you can add in any web page in it's own tab in an iframe, so for instance, I have my blog editor as its own tab.

Result: Ah, I'm so easily pleased. Everything under one roof.

When you can do all this for free you wonder how any institutional service can compete really, and that goes for students as well as staff.