The Ed Techie

Limewire and iTunes talking behind my back

I thought I'd have a play with Limewire (while respecting copyright laws naturally), so downloaded it onto one laptop. For those who haven't played with it, Limewire creates a folder for shared files, which you download to and share with others (it also offers to search your hard disk for any media files to search, which is a bit of a security nightmare, so I declined).

While I wait for my Toshiba to be mended, I have put iTunes and all my music on another old, laptop. When I started this up iTunes created a menu item for my shared Limewire folder, which was on a different computer. This puzzled, concerned and delighted me simultaneously. While not wanting to resort to computer anthropomorphism, I was left asking 'how does it know?' I didn't give Limewire my itunes id, or vice versa.

The answer is probably obvious to everyone else, but it took me a while to figure it out - it is because they are both on the same wireless network in my home, so iTunes searches for any other DAAP software and automatically integrates it. I thought this was neat, but it made me kind of nervous in two ways: i) what other info was being accessed and by who, and ii) it has kind of Forbin Project overtones with computers talking to each other without need for me. What else are they doing together?

An academic LinkedIn

Typepad are promoting a LinkedIn widget, so I thought I'd check out the site and created a profile. If you haven't seen it, then it's kind of a business-oriented MySpace with a bit of FriendsReunited thrown in. They make a big play of the power of connectivity, and I can see how it would be useful for those headhunting (or likely to be headhunted), particularly in the IT industry, or those looking for venture capital. It was very US oriented obviously. I felt as though it was too business-oriented to be much use to me though (although I'm always up for a bit of consultancy if you want). But one could imagine an academic version of this - where the categories were focused around research, publications, teaching interests, grants, etc. It would be useful to find those interested in forming research consortia, sharing learning objects, collaborating on development, etc.

I know there have been some projects looking at eportfolios or personal repositories to do this (the PROWE project I'm involved with is an example), but I'm not aware of such a site for academics. There are a number of networks associated with finding partners for EU projects also, but nothing that is as informal and individually focused as this - I'd be interested to hear of one if there is.

Obviously it's one of those critical mass things - it only works if the community is large enough to make the connections worthwhile. Inevitably this has been converted to a 'law' (in the business, not physics or legal sense) - Reid's law (after Reid Hoffman the co-founder of LinkedIn), which says that "the usefulness of a business network grows exponentially as its ranks expand" (well, yes, I suppose it does is the obvious response to this). I do feel that this is a tool/service that is best developed by a business start-up rather than as the result of an academic research project. Not that I'm going to do it of course...

Gift finder

This is quite neat - a gift finder, presumably based on some data mining principles. I did it for myself and my wife - it came up with some good suggestions. I must have indicated some rather whimsical, tree-hugging options at some point as some of them were a bit along the magic crystal line for my liking, but generally they were okay.

Computer Voodoo

I got a new Toshiba laptop a couple of months ago. I suppose I should have learnt by now, but I thought maybe computer technology would be more reliable than in the days of my PhD when my PC case was never screwed down because taking it apart was such a regular occurrence. The battery packed up after a month and then last week it started freezing on start-up. When I tried it in safe mode it seemed to get stuck at mup.sys. It seems I'm not the only one with this problem. The suggested problem seems to vary from a window service pack 2 upgrade, CMOS problem, virus or keyboard failure. The solutions are equally varied.

During the whole saga I became aware of two things:

i) The emotional state the rational machine induces in us. I ranged between violent swearing, sobbing, ennui, despair and hysteria as I wrestled over the course of three days with various start-up techniques.

ii) The superstition and irrationality you bring to these problems. At one stage I managed to get it all the way through the start-up process by continually moving the mouse. This became the first of many actions that came to constitute a start-up ritual that any religion would be proud of. Further rites included holding the laptop at an angle (and in one extreme fundamentalist sect even holding over one's head), closing and opening the lid three times and removing the power lead for ten minutes. I can't say these had any objective measure of success, but they had enough promise of success to be worth doing. And computers have become so complex that although I know they were mostly ridiculous, I couldn't be quite sure that they were redundant. They became the IT equivalent of sprinkling the dirt from a grave before midnight over the computer - sure it doesn't work, but hey, it's worth a try.

One day matters

I posted an entry at the HistoryMatters site today which is trying to record one normal day in history (today), by creating a mass blog. I've always been a fan of those books that record the minutiae of life, over one day (e.g. Nicholson Baker's Mezzanine, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Ian McEwan's Saturday), so I like the idea of this social history of just an ordinary day. I think my entry ended up with too many big points, and not enough of the mundane (what did I have for breakfast?* What clothes am I wearing? Who did I talk to?, What was on the radio?). It'll be interesting to review this in even a year's time.

* Crumpets, since you ask.

Blufr - an example

As a small example of what I was saying in my earlier post about letting the technology lead, take a look at a fun site called Blufr. The idea is simple - you are given a statement which could or could not be true and you have to state whether you believe it or not. But it's given a web 2.0 twist by showing how many people have been bluffed by this statement, and then you are given a score for each one you get correct. They're being coy about their scoring mechanism, but let us imagine that it is based on the number of people who have been bluffed, ie the more people who are fooled by a statement then the higher the score you get if you are correct.

Now, let's play the 'how could I use that in my course?' game. You could take the technology and create a database of your own statements in your subject area. Then you add them in to your VLE, and students get to informally test their knowledge, taking as many questions as they want. You can cash in and get your score whenever you want, so like in blufr, maybe you have a score board to throw in a bit of motivation. And now maybe you extend it out so that students can add their own bluff statements (maybe you make it part of an assessment that they have to create one). Again, you can make a bit of a lighthearted competition of it by assigning a score to the one that bluffs most people. Perhaps you could extend it again, so groups have to do the tests, and the scores are based on how few people get it wrong, so the incentive is to increase the overall understanding of the group, not the individual.

In e-learning terms it's got some potential - it promotes that informal, periodic testing of knowledge that both improves understanding and provides impetus, it has some inbuilt motivation to take part, it creates a social dynamic, and it's kinda fun.

Now it's not going to be a killer app or anything, just one of many tools. But my point is it would be reasonably useful, and I can make an educational justification for using it, but until this morning I didn't know I wanted a tool that could do this.

Slideshare

Tony Hirst pointed me to Slideshare - in short it's a Flickr for Powerpoint presentations. It's only in beta at the moment. You might think 'so what?' but I think they might be on to something. They make the pitch that lots of presentations are lost, or we end up emailing them around. But equally it could be a great resource. Much of MIT's opencourseware is in the form of powerpoint files. If every educator put their presentations up here, it would represent a really good repository for students and fellow educators. Now, I know Powerpoint files are limited, and having them without the context is often near useless, but they do represent a kind of lingua franca of dissemination - not the best, but a reasonable base level.

You can also embed your Slideshare presentation in a blog, so here's my trial with my presentation from Monday on research directions in VLEs.

Software patents animation

Nice animation explaining software patents at YouTube.

Pretexting and the death of the HP way

Well the HP way has been near death for a long while, but surely the current crisis at HP spells its demise. In 2002 The Palo Alto weekly was forecasting its end. This quote from that article particularly highlights the difference between the initial culture fostered by Hewlett and Packard and the current debacle: "When former employees reminisce about the HP Way, they toss around words like "integrity," "trust," and "team." Hmm, there doesn't seem to have been an abundance of trust and integrity in this case.

The OU has just received a grant from the Hewlett Foundation (not related to HP, set up by William and Flora Hewlett separately) to make our content open, as did MIT with the open courseware project. One can't imagine such philanthropy from those currently at the helm in HP, they'd be more likely to spend their money increasing the legal restrictions on content than making it freely available.

The crisis also highlights the dangers of euphemisms. The practice of obtaining phone records from employees without their knowledge is known as 'pretexting'. Now, if it was called 'spying' then it would seem unsavoury, but pretexting sounds scientific, techy and modern. One can imagine the conversation:

Investigator - 'Well I could get all their phone records and then we'd know who the leak was.'

HP person - 'Isn't that spying?'

Investigator - 'No, no, no, that would be illegal. It's pretexting.'

HP - 'Oh, in that case, go ahead.'

Will SpiralFrog be my usability saviour?

Following my disenchantment with iTunes, I was interested to read this piece in today's Guardian. SpiralFrog will offer (legal) free downloads in exchange for suffering an ad while the download is taking place. Given that I could probably have watched a couple of Kurosawa films while the download from iTunes was taking place on my last laptop, this doesn't seem too much of a hardship. It isn't really cost that is the determining factor for me though (although given the choice, I prefer free), but rather choice (I need those eighties indie bands more than James Blunt) and, to rather hammer the point home, usability and robustness. SpiralFrog will need to make sure they crack these.

It is also another example of the drive toward all content being free. With the success of open source, the rise of open content and the liberation of information one sometimes wonders if _everything_ will be free one day. I await the first open source car with interest.