The Ed Techie

Blogs and broadcast

Hilarious post from John Naughton about a researcher from Richard and Judy contacting him to ask about blogs, and just not getting it. They asked John to appear on the show and he declined. Shame -  personally I think John's withering responses to Richard Madeley's platitudes would have been a YouTube classic.

I haven't had that much to do with journalists but when I have I have always had an encounter similar to John's - you are trying to explain something and they say 'so can we say the internet has killed television' (or something similar). And I reply, 'no, what I mean is ...' and then they come back and say 'so we'll say that the internet has mortally wounded television' Then, resigned and tired I say, 'yeah, that's right.' There does seem to be this overriding need to simplify things to a standard position.

I have been asked to do radio a few times but it's never come off, and now I don't get asked much. I think you need to have either a big profile in a specific subject area (like John) or actively court these things. This is something of a relief to be honest -  if Garrison Keillor has a good face for radio, I have a good voice for mime.

Yes, iTunes is unusable!

After transferring all my songs I plugged in my three ipods (not simultaneously) in to my new computer. The mini worked fine, the shuffle had no problem but when it came to the nano, itunes wouldn't recognise it. It then said the ipod software needed updating. I agreed to this, and it promptly wiped all the songs from the nano and corrupted it. I spent most of Friday evening and Saturday morning trying to retrieve the nano, but to no avail. I followed all the advice on the Apple support site, but the nano won't be recognised by the computer or itunes now, even after resetting. Inbetween bouts of sobbing, swearing and ranting the thought that kept coming back to me was 'playing music shouldn't be this difficult.' So, reluctantly I think I'll have to go back to CDs and just use ipod like a walkman, but not as the main music hub.

About eight years ago I spent a lot of time researching the computer business (for the course T171 - You, your computer and the Net which used the story of the PC to teach about computers). My attitude towards Microsoft varies between the standard anti-proprietary approach that anyone who works with open source software adopts and being a partial apologist. What I never understood though was the 'Microsoft bad, Apple good' attitude that many people have. Sure, Apple products have a much higher design aesthetic (Bill Gates wouldn't really know good design if it control-alt-deleted him), but Apple products are by no means more robust than MS ones, and arguably the dogmatically practical approach of MS has done more to democratise computing than the somewhat elitist attitude of Apple. And as for openess, well Apple don't score highly there either.

Is iTunes becoming unusable?

I am one of those iTunes users who has gone over completely - I don't buy CDs anymore. All was well for a while, but increasingly I am finding that iTunes is struggling to scale up to the sort of demands that a well stocked library places on it. I'm not that an intensive user - I have about 2000 songs in my library - but on my old laptop it had become unusable. I think it is a real CPU hog, and it got to the stage where there was a one minute delay for every action. So you click on a song, a minute later it is highlighted. Trying to create playlists or organize your library is impossible.

I got a new laptop this week, and the performance has greatly improved. However, connecting to the music store is still painfully slow. The little bar goes halfway along and then stops. You go away, write a blog entry, come back and it's still waiting. This is with a good broadband connection and a zippy processor.

I'm sure these problems can be ironed out but what it demonstrates to me is the way software gets stretched and used in ways that haven't really been planned for by its designers. Apple must have done some load testing, but maybe not from the UK on a slowish laptop. The trouble is if you are setting yourself up as the new music format, then it has to be ultra-reliable. At the moment I am thinking of digging my old CD player out.

Now, if iTunes was open source, my guess is these problems would be ironed out, but at the moment they seem more concerned with adding new features rather than resolving reliability and robustness issues. I fear they will face something of a backlash though if these issues aren't addressed.

Corporate sympathy

I had to renew my car tax the other day. I can't tell you how impressed I was that I could do this online now. Gone are the days of lining up in post office queues sandwiched between chainsmoking alcoholics, only to find the document you have entitled 'Insurance Certificate' is not in fact a certificate of insurance, and being told curtly to come back and enjoy the experience again tomorrow.

I am always impressed when these things actually work because working for a large institution I have an appreciation of systemic complexity. One of the (many) problems with modern media is that they simply cannot understand complexity - they always seek to find an individual to blame and having done this, they feel the problem is solved. But in large organisations dealing with complex tasks it can be the case that everyone is working perfectly well but things can still go wrong. That's the nature of complexity. For this reason I always find myself rather siding with the corporate spokesperson who is called on to a consumer rights programme such as Watchdog and is given a grilling by the unsympathetic presenter who prides themselves on being the people's champion.

So, when things like the tax renewal work, I am pleasantly surprised because I have an understanding of the complexity of the problem - imagine having to coordinate all those databases, get agreement from the insurance agencies, create the appropriate software, check with the MOT database, and so on.

Is everything an urban myth?

When I was doing the post yesterday about the wisdom of crowds, I was going to use the example of the mob that attacked a paediatrician, confusing them for a paedophile, as an example of the dumbness of crowds. I was sure that this actually happened on an estate in Portsmouth, and many well informed people have used it as an example of the dangers of hysterical crowds.

Turns out it is something of an urban myth, and the truth is more about the dumbness of an individual than a cautionary tale about mobs, as the BBC reports.

I always flattered myself for having a reasonably good nose for urban myths, but it goes to show that you can always get fooled. I mean, next they'll be telling me the Kentucky fried rat isn't real.

Death of broadcast?

I am part of the Broadcast Strategy Review group at the OU at the moment. This is currently realised through our relationship with the BBC, with the general audience programmes and the excellent open2.net stuff. But in an e-learning, internet age the very definition of broadcast needs to be re-examined.  The OU needs to reexamine what it means from pedagogic value and return on investment perspectives. To put it crudely, is it better to have 10 high quality programmes or 10,000 lower quality podcasts/feeds. There are a number of issues here:

Quality - generally people are prepared lower quality on a lot of internet media, e.g. podcasts, video clips, etc because they are getting material closer to their needs. There is a trade off here between appropriateness and production quality.

Integration with courses - the traditional OU model was to make programmes for specific courses (you get minus ten points if you mention kipper ties here). The last agreement was focused around more general interest programmes, fulfilling an outreach function. An internet focused model has the potential to be course, or subject area specific.

New models of outreach - TV is the broadcast medium par excellence, and much has been made of the difficult to market things on the net. However, there are effective models, and also initiatives like the Open Content project have the possibility of fulfilling the outreach function.

Range of providers - put bluntly, if you want to make TV programmes then the BBC are your best bet of partner, and there is a pretty limited pool to choose from. If you want internet content (be it regular feeds, multimedia, podcasts, articles, etc) then the choice of providers is much broader (although BBC online is probably amongst the best here too).

This will be a consultative review, and I don't know what the conclusions will be, but it strikes me as one of those zeitgeist projects, so I'm quite excited about it.

I (verb) therefore I am (annoying/important)

A friend of mine was commenting on the way in which verbs seem to hold more sway than any other catagory of word. People don't mind if you invent a new noun, and will chuckle politely if you coin a new adjective, but to create a new verb is to invite the wrath of language purists everywhere. And related to this, you know a technology has become significant when you can use it as a verb and both be understood and escape physical abuse. So in any one day I may blog, google or skype. As yet I would hesitate in public to say I flickr or wiki, and I can't see the day when I would ever utter 'I delicioused it', but you get the idea. Probably a warning to companies or developers - try using your product/technology name as a verb - if you wince at it then try a different one.

Social social software

My friend and colleague John Naughton gave his inaugural lecture yesterday. Afterwards a few of us were invited to the Vice Chancellor's house for dinner. There I met some people who I hadn't seen for a while (such as Quentin Stafford-Fraser), and some I hadn't met before. What struck me was that because I subscribe to John's Blog I feel that I know a lot of these people already, or have maintained contact with them through their blogs or Flickr photostreams.

This reminded me that when I was in Como last week, I often found myself thinking about the situation in terms of a prospective blog post, or taking photos with Flickr in mind. I think this social life of social software, ie the social impact it has in actuall face to face situations, as opposed to the more obvious online community, is less appreciated. It is also an antidote to the grumpy old men/women who claim that the internet is ruining real social skills. On the contrary, I had an interesting conversation last night based on having viewed someone's Flickr photostream, which wouldn't have been possible had it not been public. Similarly, I think that many people take up, or increase their interest in photography because of the presence of Flickr, far more than any photographic exhibition. There is a direct push back in to the real world from the virtual one that makes people more engaged with it, not less.

When I missed the wiki bus

I am on the steering committee for the PROWE project, and attended a meeting today. The project seems to be going well, but all this recent obsession with wikifying everything gave me cause to reflect on how I had rather missed the opportunity to get in early with this technology. In 1997 I attended a conference and heard Mark Guzdial talking about them. I could see how useful they'd be in distance education and when I came back to the OU I evangelised about them briefly. Then other things got in the way and I let them drop, and it was only last year that I finally introduced one on a course. I regret not having stuck at it a bit more in the early days - I could have become a wiki guru! Sadly my suggestion that we just put up a whole course in a wiki and let students update and modify it is always rebuffed on the grounds of quality assurance. Even the Open Content team baulked at it. Come on guys, go with the flow.

Software - more is not always better

Spent a frustrating day creating the images for my book today. Now up front I have to own up to the artistic level of your average 9 year old. Struggling with Corel Draw reminded me of the old days of trying to get the bloody thing to do what you want. I have become accustomed to easy to use software, which does one or two things simply, that I tend not to encounter these very specialist packages any more. What I wanted to do was create some fairly simple diagrams, but for instance, drawing a normal distribution curve that wasn't skewed, bumpy or in some way deformed proved to be beyond me. My colleague Patrick McAndrew jokes that there are only three diagrams in Higher Education - the Venn diagram, the triangulation of forces and the normal distribution curve. There is something in this, and what I need is a drawing package that doesn't give me lots of features, but lets me do the simple things effectively. The drawing package in Word is not bad for this, but the output often lacks that more professional (or less amateur) look. There probably is such a package out there. My point is that development is always about adding more, but for a whole range of users it's not about more, it's about simpler.