The Ed Techie

What are you an analogue snob about?

I was contacted yesterday by someone writing a piece for The Times on parental snobbery. They had come across my posting on My Own Leisure Snobbery and wanted to know if they could use it. By the way, having just done two blogging talks this was a minor example of the economics of reputation concept - this person would never have contacted me normally. In my response I mentioned that I was an occassional anaologue snob, and that being an analogue snob was a sure giveaway of being a digital immigrant, to use Prensky's term.

I recounted the story of when we were in a restaurant recently and my daughter and her cousin were swapping pictures via their Nintendo DSs. I used to be a bit judgemental about kids sitting there with gameboys, but that was before I had my own child, and I realised what a Godsend they were. There was a table behind us of older people who were casting disapproving looks at the children though for this blatant display of digitalness. It struck me that if the children were swapping pictures on bits of paper, then everyone would think it was sweet.

This made me reflect on what I was an analogue snob about. Not that much, but two things came to mind:

• Watches - I have an automatic with a glass back so you can see the movement, and I think it is a thing of wonder. It gains about 5 minutes a week and is much less reliable than a digital watch, but I have always felt proper watches should have a movement.
• Art - it's got to have paint, canvas and stuff you know?

Now I think these are justifiable snobberies, that in these cases analogue is simply better, but maybe not. For some people photography would be another case (not me, I'm a point and click merchant). So, what's the thing your an analogue snob about?

[Update - the piece in the Times by Michele Kirsch was published here, although it got rather trimmed down in favour of an advert apparently. Not a problem one has with blogging I will snootily point out]

Value of EdTechie

John pointed me at this Cyberwire site which calculates the monetary value of your site - pointless but irresistible. Mine is worth $5,662. For one moment I thought that was a monthly figure, but it's annual. We always said we didn't do it for money didn't we? (and I bet if I did start plugging this site for adverts as much as they suggest the traffic would wane).

The future is here...

.. we just haven't noticed it.

I had a fairly normal working day today, but I reflected on how technologically infused it was. This posting isn't meant to be smug and purvey how modern my life is, since I'm aware that (strange though it may seem) some people are not working in educational technology, and so the working day of, a plumber say, may not be so affected (but probably more financially rewarding). And also there are people who live a far more technologically enhanced life, but it struck me that we have these small incremental changes and occassionally we have to take stock. Below is my day, and I like to think that had I seen such a diary in 1990 I would have thought it was the restricted to science fiction or at least some kind of techno-eltite:

• 8am. I was working from home, which is in Cardiff, and my workplace is 150 miles away in Milton Keynes, so I start the day with email.
• 8.30 I do a blog post on the wiki tool wetpaint.
• 9.00 I have a conference call with a team at the OU working on Learning Design.
• 10.00 I have a Flashmeeting with partners on the Flosscom project who are based in Milton Keynes, Greece and Germany.
• 11.00 I have a Skype video chat, with 2 colleagues at the OU library where we haven't been able to synchronise diaries for a face to face meeting.
• 12.00 I share a document with some colleagues via Google docs
• 2.00 I start preparing a presentation for a blogging workshop. I find images that other people have created via Flickr and a couple of excellent video clips via YouTube, and look for ideas from Powerpoint presentations shared by strangers on Slideshare.
• 3.30 I update my Facebook profile after being invited to be somebody's friend and not having used Facebook for ages.
• 5.00 I meet my wife and go down the pub (okay, not much technology involved there).

Sometimes you take all this stuff for granted and it's worth stopping every now and then to really appreciate the changes that have taken place. And while all of this has been possible for a few years now, the point is that it all worked (reasonably) seamlessly and the technology was almost transparent - we just used it. When it is this pervasive in your working life you have to say that a revolution of sorts has taken place - you just haven't acknowledged it.

What a difference some design makes

I came across wetpaint today - a service that allows people to easily create wikis. Nothing particularly new there, but here's the catch - they look good! Most wikis are a bit on the bland side, but without any specialist programming skills anyone can create an attractive wiki here. It seems to have caught on too with lots of hobby and interest sites flourishing, although a lot of them seem to be just using it to create websites that don't really do much by the way of wiki.

I am currently considering where we house the FLOSScom summer school (which will be about learning in an open source community), and wikiversity seems the logical choice, but the interface of wetpaint is nicer and may encourage more participation.

The poetry of webcams

When I first started out on the web, around 1995, I thought web cams were marvellous. They've kind of fallen off my radar since (maybe they've been made a bit grubby). I was playing around with Google Desktop today and one of the widgets you could add was one that cycles through webcam shots from around the world, which you can then call up. I spent an hour or so looking at these, and there is still a thrill at being able to take control of a camera on the other side of the world and turn it to look down the street.

It strikes me that a better writer than I could make something quite moving from the following scenes I observed:

• A single fishing boat putting out to sea from an Italian port
• Cars coming home along the sea front in Japan
• A solitary car driving through the middle of the night in Iowa
• The trees rustling on a campus in Virginia
• A car parked in the rain by a river in New England

Interesting the way that the subscription model and Google Desktop has reawakened my interest in this 'old' technology.

Is marketing dead?

Chris Anderson posted on Google's attitude towards marketing, which was 'we know we're good, everyone will try us so don't do it.' I've been having a few discussions around marketing as part of the broadcast review, and how companies such as YouTube just completely ignore all the rules of marketing. Let's take adverts as the purest form of marketing (I know there are lots of other methods, but they are usually adverts dressed up), I see these as rather greedy chunks of resource. They don't do anything except say 'here I am, this is the product.' And they cost a lot of money to say this. If you take viral marketing in its proper sense, not in the 'marketing companies trying to do normal marketing in a viral way' sense, then it works because the resource does something. It entertains, it educates, it informs, it encourages dialogue, etc. Take YouTube - an advert for the site would be pretty pointless, but allowing people to actually share the content is powerful. A traditional marketing guy would never have understood that.

If one considers this in educational terms then perhaps the best form of marketing universities can do is to create educational content that is freely available. This then serves not one, but three functions:

i) It can be used by the university in its own courses.

ii) It fulfills an outreach/public good function as others can use it.

iii) It advertises the university.

Compare that with simply having an add that says 'gee it's fun to study at X' and I can see a time when traditional marketing begins to look like a shaky investment.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of those in marketing everywhere, I've never really understood it as an academic discipline either. This is after all a field whose Cistine Chapel is Gilette's 'Give away the razor, sell the blades' policy and whose Theory of Relativity is the rebranding of the viscosity of Heinz ketchup. I feel rather like marketing as Galbraith did of economic forecasting when he said "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

Things to do in the middle of the night

I woke up with a cough last night and couldn't get back to sleep so came downstairs. While doing some surfing (as an aside to this aside, I never turn the TV on at such times anymore), I accidentally hit the return key after just typing in K in the browser. It took me straight to the wikipedia definition of K. Odd, I thought, so I tried L, and that got the wikipedia definition as well. I wondered if wikipedia had the whole alphabet sewn up, so went through each letter. It seems my initial two hits were just beginner's luck. Most single letters (without the addition of any domain entry e.g. .com) returned Google searches, but a few of them went directly to sites. In case you're interested (and I know you are), the following are the lucky letters:

e http://www.eonline.com/

g google mail

k http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K

l http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L

N http://www.the-n.com/

r http://www.r-project.org/

t http://www.att.com/gen/landing-pages?pid=3308

y http://mail.yahoo.com/

I then wondered why more single letters don't take you to sites, so looked up single letter domain names. It turns out this was something of a hot issue, with six single letter domain names reserved, but apart from that these the internet governing body has reserved the rest under the .com, .net and .org names.  Steve Krause explains http://www.stevekrause.org/steve_krause_blog/2007/02/why_no_singlele.html

This is slightly different, as the ones mentioned above are not the ones reserved, but is based on there being no alternatives for google to find I guess?

Anyway, amazing what you discover at 3am and better than watching the shopping channel surely.

The irrationality of preference

Having posted about Google desktop and Netvibes it made me consider why Netvibes is my preferred personal portal. There are many others available and while I could come up with a justification for Netvibes over Pageflakes, say, it would all be a bit post hoc. In a recent survey on VLE use in universities the OECD pointed out that

"there was little to choose between different systems. The past seven years of intensive LMS development and adoption in tertiary education have seen considerable system convergence…. Some respondents asserted that a particular system was the “only genuine” enterprise LMS, or “by far the easiest” to use, but it was difficult to evidence such claims. "

I think in some ways we choose software on a much less rational basis than we might like to admit, and rather like our choice of football team (or religion if you prefer), this very irrationality of selection makes us defend our choice more vigorously. Having made a selection free from logic, we are then able to indulge it at an emotional level. I have often been struck by how emotionally attached people are to particular software packages. When deciding on a particular piece of software to use for a project or course I have found myself in very heated debates, which pretend to be about functionality, or database compatibility, but are in fact about personal identity, emotional attachment, love even. Within particular functions we tend to be monoamorous, so you only love one browser/operating system, etc. We can be happily be polyamorous across different functions ie you can love an operating system and a browser.

The analogy with football is too tempting (and obvious) for me to pass up. You have to be monoamorous supporting a team at one level (any football fan that tells you they support Arsenal and Chelsea say is by definition, not a football fan and deserves your contempt). But you can be polyamorous across different levels, e.g. you can support one national team, one main team and maybe your local non-league team also. I'm being slightly flippant here, but there does seem to be a similar process in operation - it may be an evolutionary tick, the process for promoting monogamy to secure the succession of your genes latching on to other aspects in life also.

And then you have to produce a 20 page business case for a committee that incorporates your software choice in an objective manner...

Google Desktop vs Netvibes

I installed Google Desktop a few months back, but didn't really do anything with it, mainly because I was viewing it as it is billed - a desktop search tool. Probably because I'm quite linear in the way I work (I'm male - I don't do multi-tasking), a desktop search tool isn't something I really need a lot. Sure I need to find online resources, but then I use normal Google, or search journal databases (if Google could sort out the federated search across multiple database problem, that would be useful). But now I have my new laptop (a Vaio - why did it take PC manufacturers so long to realise that just because we use Windows doesn't mean we like beige - Mac users need not reply), I took the time to configure the other parts. I'm now almost a fan, and usually I don't bother with client-based software much. I love having my main blogroll going continually - it's a small window so you couldn't have all blogs in there, but the people who post a lot it's worth following. I put some quick reminders in the scratch pad, I have a number of different Flickr photo streams, as well as the My Pictures archive scrolling through on Photos, I use the To Do list to organise my day, and I even check the weather (it says it is raining in Cardiff today, and a quick look out the window - yes, it's right!).

So it's very quickly become part of the constellation of tools and services I operate within. I also use Netvibes for some similar purposes, so here is how they compare for me:

Google Desktop:

Pluses - always present, embedded search facility, good range of tools

Minuses - can be a distraction (I keep jumping off to look at photos that come by, or read blog entries - not good when you are trying to write a project plan), slow to load (maybe a result of the indexing process), photo streams seem to get stuck showing the same pictures (particularly if it is loading ones from hard drive).

Netvibes:

Pluses - tabs makes it much more structured, seems much quicker at loading RSS (postings that have yet to appear in GD show up immediately), potentiall richer tool set

Minuses - no desktop integration, need to visit site, not a search tool

The real reason behind that Cisco lawsuit

So Cisco are suing Apple for the use of the iphone name. I heard this numerous times today and my initial reaction was 'how could Apple have been so dumb?' But then I noticed that every news report seemed contractually obliged to mention that the iphone 'which Apple describe as magical', was a really cool product - and who are this Cisco bunch anyway?

And then idiots like me blog about it - in this day alone Apple have recouped more in advertising and blogosphere chat than any lawsuit will cost them. When you're Steve Jobs and you have cool looking gadgets, all publicity really is good publicity.

On the subject of the phone itself I'm not convinced by the pricing - it costs an absolute fortune and then they tie you in with only one provider (at the moment in the US that is what is planned anyway). This is Apple's old closed world view in play again - they may be the last great proprietary company. Ironically, given their foundations, they resemble IBM more every day - I think in many years to come we will view them both as one of the same kind. In much the same way that we no longer view Hard Times as an historical novel from Dickens, but just a Dickens novel, the gap between the two is lost when viewed from a decent time lapse.