The Ed Techie

The most difficult part of installing Linux?

Getting Windows to burn the CD in the first place.

Doug Clow has a nice log on installing Ubuntu on an old laptop. This is really by way of outing Doug as a proper blogger now - welcome to the fold Doug, all your academic publications are behind you now...

some iPod touch thoughts

I got an iPod touch for Christmas and using it has brought home a few things to me. These are all from the department of the bleeding obvious but for what it's worth here they are:

Firstly the interface is just lovely to use. It makes me want to pick it up and play with it. This goes beyond mere practicality - I could probably find other devices that offer me the same functionality, but I wouldn't feel the same impulse to use them as I do with the touch.

Next, being wi-fi enabled has really brought home the "web as platform" concept. I've talked about this lots of times but having a tool with a locked operating system makes it real. My first instinct was to think "I need to install some apps" but of course I didn't. With wi-fi I can access docs, organizer, spreadsheet, etc

Following on from this some sites are better than others. A few have specially designed iphone sites which offer reduced functionality but with neater design. Mentions go to remember the milk, google reader, facebook and typepad.

Now a negative - no Flash in Safari and from what I can gather no way of installing it. You can do a Jailbreak hack which allows you to install a couple of the apps that are on the iPhone, but it seems Adobe and Apple haven't worked out a version of Flash that functions with the pinch and drag interface. It's not clear if this is technical or political.

Lastly it has made me appreciate the value of instant start-up and access. Often I just want to check something quickly but my laptop has gone into hibernation, takes ages to reboot and then freezes, by which time I've lost the will to do it. With the touch it's there straight away. This makes certain types of activity easier - for instance twittering, so expect to see more updates.

Oh, it's taught me one more thing too - my wife gets me better presents than I get her.
(This post was produced on an iPod touch)

The future of gifts is personalisation

It was the 40th birthday of a friend of mine recently and I was rather at a loss as to what to get them. I've known him for 20 years so I started thinking about our time in the eighties when we did some travelling together and spent weekends partying. The (often rather poor) music we listened to at the time came back to me, so I started compiling a playlist in iTunes with the idea of burning a CD. It then occurred to me that I could probably give the playlist as a gift, and yes you can:

The gift went down well, and I had great fun compiling it. With the ease with which we can manipulate digital content, combined with cheap printing, having personalised gifts seems an easy step to make now. A few companies have started doing this, but I think it'll become the norm over the next few years. Simply getting someone a book or CD will seem something of an insult, because the most valuable thing you can give someone is the time and effort you put into a gift. Personalised board games, videos, books - that's what I want for Christmas (and maybe an iPhone too).

Google answers existential question 'Where am I?'

Tony has a post on Google's new My Location service. It uses mobile phone cell tower identification (so no GPS required) to give you your location on Google Maps for mobile.

Reminds me of my favourite Einstein story - he once rang his wife Elsa and asked 'where am I? And where should I be?' If only he'd had Google...

Filesharing and the attrition of centralised systems

I'm a dog with a bone now...

Following on from my previous post about the annoyance of mailbox size limits, this post from Judy O'Connell caught my eye - Fileurls just lets you upload and share files for up to 9 days, which can be password protected. So if anyone is planning on sending me an email with an attachment, can they just use this instead please (or Google docs is fine too)?

Which got me thinking - in our recent debate around loosely coupled systems one of the arguments against them was that educators wouldn't want to do it. But I think the way it happens is that we still have the centralised systems, but their boundaries become blurred. For example, we still use email, but increasingly we use tools like the ones above, which are outside university systems, to actually share files. Then we use Skype for chats or small tutorials. Then one educator sets up just a placeholder in the VLE which says 'Go to this wikispace for the course' or 'the course will be delivered through my blog'. There is thus a process of attrition around the institution's systems which after a while makes them untenable, or largely irrelevant.

What Mailbox limits reveal

Grainne posted recently about the frustration of continually getting the 'Your mailbox is over its size limit' in our OU email accounts. I can't tell you how annoying this - sometimes I am just trying to send a quick response to someone before I have to dash out of the door, but it won't let me because I have to find and delete any attachment over 2K to free up space. Grrrr.

This isn't OU bashing, I've heard the same from people at other universities and also people not in higher education (I know, they do exist apparently). It's a small thing but it reveals a number of more important issues:

i) In a time when free email accounts offer gigs of storage, why do institutional services offer a poorer service. Is this another argument for the loosely coupled, or at least outsourced systems (as an aside, good to see Niall and Tony making up over their debate around this).

ii) It portrays a top-down attitude from IT providers to how we should use their systems. I am told when I complain that I shouldn't use my inbox as a filing system and I should make offline folders. Wrong, I should use them in whatever way is convenient to me (and see next point about filing).

iii) It is a classic example of Weinberger's distinction between filtering on the way in and filtering on the way out. IT people want me to filter on the way in, that is to save messages to appropriate folders. I want to filter on the way out, that is to search for emails according to different criteria. Faced with information overload, filtering on the way out is the best solution.

So the next time you get a mailbox full message, give them points i) to iii). Then quietly set about deleting your messages.

Apple used to be so open...

 

I'm reading 'Founders at Work' at the moment (quite an interesting read, I'll probably summarise the key issues in a later post). I know (or knew anyway) a lot about the start of the computer industry, having created a course on it, so I was more interested in the net start ups. But there is an interview with Steve Wozniak in there, in which he says of the Apple II (my italics)

"It was just open to all these things. We made it easy for anyone to do what they wanted to do. And I think that was one of the biggest keys to its success. We didn't make it a hidden machine that we own...

We put out manuals that had just hundreds of pages of listings of code, descriptions of circuits, examples of boards that you would plug in - so that anyone could look at this and say 'Now I know how I would do my own.' ... So one of our big keys to success was that we were very open. There's a big world out there for other people to come and join us."

Now fast forward 28 years or so and you'd struggle to say that about a single Apple product now wouldn't you? For instance, Ray Corrigan has a post of Apple's latest round of digital locks, including the iPhone ring tunes eraser. None of this follows from Wozniak's description above, so how did a company so open become one so closed?

Software sedimentation

I came across this term from Jaron Lanier (in an essay in the book The Next Fifty Years). He writes:

"Software sedimentation is a process whereby not only protocols, but the ideas embedded in them become mandatory. An example is the idea of the file.... Files are now taught to students as a fact of life as fundamental as a photon, even though they are a human invention."

I think there is truth in this, and I like the mental image of sediment building up within the concepts built in to software and technology. To expand the idea out somewhat, the same might be true of many educational practices. The lecture for example (stop groaning at the back), is mandatory because of the physical and cultural sedimentation embodied in university campuses, so that to many academics and students, it seems natural. But like files in software, there are other ways to approach the particular problem (how to move someone from a position of not knowing to knowing in this case). InLanier's example software is part of the problem, but for other examples, software and technology can be part of the solution - because by using new technologies it makes practitioners think about new ways of doing things. Sedimentation can be very hard, and costly, to remove, and potentially new technologies offer a means of achieving this.

This does however, argue for a more radical shift in our deployment of e-learning technologies than my succession model proposes. The danger of a slow change is that it allows sediment to build up - as an obvious example, VLEs that simply mirror the lecture practice.

Why you shouldn't follow the Apple example

Now Richard Scoble knows more about this stuff than I ever will, but I disagree with his suggestion that Microsoft and other companies should learn from, and follow, the Steve Jobs approach to openness. Scoble is talking about PR, not technology so much, but I think that openness in the former follows from its adoption in the latter. Now I'm not going to argue that the iPhone has had great publicity, and that it looks very cool, but that doesn't make Apple an example to follow. In fact, I think it proves they are the exception to the rule. Apple are the last great closed IT company. Look at the DRM monopoly they want to create around iTunes, the lock in with AT & T for the iPhone, the very literal closed nature of iPods and the iPhone so you can't even replace the chuffing battery, the control over the OS, etc. The most open they get is allowing you to upload playlists to iTunes and their link up with that other bastion of openness, Nike.

Now this works for Apple because a) they have momentum, b) they have a quasi-religious following and c) they do know good design. But it would be commercial suicide for any other company to follow, including as Scoble suggests, Microsoft, because they only have a) from the previous list.

Just as IBM were large and successful but precisely not the model to follow when Apple started out, so any start up should pretty much avoid most of the Apple methodology.

Email's sick bed

In 1997 John Naughton explained to me that he needed a kind of online journal to keep track of all his thoughts around stuff he found online. He created one himself in HTML. He was describing what we would come to know as a blog. It took me ten years to then become a blogger. So, last week when John said he thought email was unusable now, even though I didn’t have the same sense of it myself, I thought I wouldn’t wait ten years to come to the same conclusion. I was away for 4 days recently, when I came back I had 159 emails (actually quite a low count), of which only 10 were directly relevant, another 20 or so I had been copied in to for interest, the rest were largely irrelevant. That’s not an efficient communication method, and this is now such a common experience that it hardly seems worthy of comment.

John isn’t the only one who feels this way, for instance Brian Kelly has posted that email is (and should) die. Students are using social network sites, Facebook and the like, and within communities subscribing to RSS feeds is now a preferred route for many over mailing lists.

In an earlier post I used a normal distribution curve for the adoption of technology. The front of this is probably uncontroversial, but the tail end might be. As technology becomes part of tradition surely the user base remains high, not decreases. What the email dissatisfaction may demonstrate is that they do decline precisely because they become part of the mainstream. They then become used by the institution, and lose their original appeal. Email used to be excellent because it was informal, as it became part of the formal mechanics, people have started finding other channels to meet their needs. So, I love blogs, and if I really don’t want them to be killed off, I should stop all this promotion of their organisational relevance.