Author: dougclow

Data scientist, tutxor, project leader, researcher, analyst, teacher, developer, educational technologist, online learning expert, and manager. I particularly enjoy rapidly appraising new-to-me contexts, and mediating between highly technical specialisms and others, from ordinary users to senior management. After 20 years at the OU as an academic, I am now a self-employed consultant, building on my skills and experience in working with people, technology, data science, and artificial intelligence, in a wide range of contexts and industries.

Subtleties of systems design

Relatively small, simple changes to the design of a system can have profound effects on the effectiveness and acceptability of the system to the users.

(This probably won’t be news to anyone reading this, but I keep coming across it in so many places. It’s definitely somewhere in my Top Ten Things In Educational Technology That Are Well-Known Or Ought To Be, below “More research required”, “Learners can fail to understand things in ways you never imagined” and “Trying to use one teaching method as if it were a different teaching method probably isn’t a great idea”, but perhaps above “Asking whether technology-enhanced learning is better than other forms is not a very illuminating question”.)

Anyway – my example for today of small systems changes is CCTV. The UK is covered in “security” cameras. This includes an awful lot of cameras pointing at roads.

In England, only the Government can see what’s on those cameras. Oh, plus anyone the Government decides to let look at them. So your experience as a user is of being spied on: you see all these cameras, and imagine that the people watching them might be up to no good. It’s creepy and feels like you’re being snooped on. Hence scare stories like this one about US agencies being allowed to spy on UK motorists.

In Wales, the Welsh Assembly has made live images from the cameras on the motorways freely available on the web. You can zoom in on your favourite bit of the M4, click on a camera icon, and see what’s going on right now. (There’s even handy ‘typical views’ for comparison with the current view.) All of a sudden, your experience changes. The cameras start to look like a useful social tool to you. And when you think of the people watching those cameras you think, blimey, that must be one hell of a boring job.

Such a small change in systems terms, but a huge one in the user experience. (Or at least in mine – I certainly feel a lot happier on the M4 in Wales than in England.) And another example of how making stuff openly available can often get you much more benefit than restricting it (though not always). Which is probably another for my Top Ten – hmm, I think this may be heading for a Top Fifty if I’m not careful.

Academics do politics differently

I used to be actively involved in my trade union, the Association of University Teachers (AUT), now merged with its traditional rival, NATFHE, to form University and College Union, (UCU). For various reasons – most pressing a lack of time – I’m no longer very active, but I do keep up with what’s going on.

I received an email from a colleague urging me to vote a particular way in a particular upcoming election. (In a doomed attempt to keep this blog focused, I won’t go in to the details – but happy to discuss them, in brief or at length, with anyone who wants to know.) I laughed out loud when I read this bit at the end:

Whatever you do please read the election material and the statements issued by both candidates..When you have done so I hope you will come to the same conclusion as me and vote for [my preference]

Fantastic campaigning there – real “rectify the anomaly” stuff. (For those who don’t know, “Rectify the anomaly” was an infamous slogan of the AUT’s from a 1970s campaign for better pay.) Polite, reasonable but leaves you clear enough what they’re trying to tell you.

It is actually pretty smart campaigning – academics and related staff generally don’t take kindly being told what to think in the way of traditional politics. Which is part of the challenge of working effectively in higher education.

Rovio: I for one welcome our new robot underlords

Another cool thingummy that’s now on my “persuade Will to buy an evaluation one”/Christmas present list – Rovio, a Wifi-enabled location-aware robot with streaming audio and video:

Rovio

The idea (in the stuff I’ve seen) is that you log in to this little thing when you’re out of your house, and you can send it around the place, watching and listening to what’s happening there. For me checking up on the house while I’m out doesn’t seem that interesting – although I can imagine it might be a lot more fun than a phone call. But checking in on colleagues in – say – an open-plan office environment – seems better. Just the job to set off a new lab!

I’m not sure the form factor is quite right for that, though. It’s very trip-overable, although the noise it makes as it moves probably gives enough notification to eliminate immediate snooping concerns.

Only $299 … but alas, not avaialable until “Early fall 2008” – which is Ok for Christmas I suppose – or indeed moving in to our new building. (When it’s recovered from the initial invasion of RC helicopters we’re likely to inflict on the atrium.)

iPlayer on Wii

I was excited last month about the BBC’s iPlayer service being available on the iPhone and iPod touch. Today I’m excited about it being available for the Nintendo Wii. Internet TV … on the TV!

It’s pretty easy – you just need the Internet Channel (Nintendo’s silly name for Opera for the Wii, and an excuse to charge you £3.50 for a browser that’s available free on pretty much every other platform ever) and then … just go to the iPlayer site and off you go.

(Incidentally, the Internet Channel on the Wii is a fantastic idea, but really brings home to me a) how poor a TV set is as a computer display and b) just how desperately poor the text-entry system is on the Wii. Watching YouTube is workable and more fun than on a computer. Very little else is.)

Of course, it’s been possible to stream videos from your PC to your Wii via the Internet Channel for a while, through various bits of software. And it is also entirely possible – if somewhat dubious – to strip the DRM from iPlayer downloads so you can stream them. (Or indeed blow them to DVD and walk them through from the PC to the living room. Never underestimate the bandwidth of sneakernet!) So this has been possible in principle for some time, but a lot more technical faff than most people can be doing with. iPlayer is about bringing P2P to the masses, rather than the geeky copyfighting few.

As another aside, I’m amused at the ISP industry taking against iPlayer. (See, e.g., El Reg’s piece on the recent spat between Tiscali and the BBC.) Parts of the IT industry often seem to want to defy ordinary economic gravity – I’m reminded of the dot-com nonsense (“How could that possibly make money?” “If you read our business plan you’d see that we will develop a monetisation strategy in Q6”). In what other industry would businesses get terribly unhappy if the demand for their product increased beyond what they had ever anticipated? Madness.

To be fair, it’s more as if they’ve worked out one way of making money and don’t want technical development and change to stop that working. Rather like mobile phone ringtone vendors, traditional record industry executives, blacksmiths and indeed the original Luddites, then. For technology companies to take that position is particularly odd. And life-limiting. I’d advise against buying Tiscali stock.

Anyway! Enough asides. What about iPlayer on the Wii? Is it any good?

Alas, no. At least, not for me tonight. The resolution is great. There seems to be far more content available than when the iPhone/iPod touch version was launched. But the bandwidth is so rubbish as to render it unwatchable with stutters and stops. Don’t know for sure what that’s down to – no problem at all on my desktop PC over Ether to my router, or my iPod touch using the same WiFi network as the Wii. Anthony Rose from the BBC mentions in his announcement that they’ve had to up the bitrate for the Wii from 500 to 820 Kbps because they need to use a less-efficient codec to work with the ancient version of Flash the Wii uses. That could be it.

Still – maybe the BBC’s wizards will fix this with tweaking. Maybe I’ll think of some way round the physical barriers to running a hard connection from my router to the Wii. Maybe something even better will turn up next month!

And while I’m waiting, my copy of Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party for the Wii should arrive very soon …

Free roaming Wifi (if you’re already rich)

For those of us who work in academia, there’s very good news afoot in the shape of the JANET roaming service, part of the eduroam federation.

Eduroam logo In a nutshell, this is a reciprocal free wifi arrangement between academic institutions, in the UK (JANET) and beyond (eduroam) – parts of Europe and Australia for now, but under development in the US and Japan. If you’re an academic, with a bit of luck that’ll be a large proportion of the places you go anyway.

I think it’ll work really easily as a user. There’s some fiendishly clever stuff in the background, and the official JANET docs make it seem dreadfully complex to use. But if I’ve understood right, and if/when it’s all working, you simply use the same username/password combo to access wifi at your home institution at any other participating institution.

To set it up you just select the right network to connect to at your home institution (the ‘eduroam’ SSID – there will probably be others locally) and get the right username/password for it. (This is locally determined, but very likely to be your standard university credentials or a simple permutation thereof.) Once your device is set up that way, poof! Off you go to any participating location and free wifi is yours with no more fuss.

(There is probably a little extra fuss if you want to be able to do more than web browsing – e.g. VPN, non-web email, remote logins. And visited institutions may have more restrictive traffic rules than your home one. I wouldn’t bank on Skype or your favourite BitTorrent client working, for instance.)

For those very local – the OU – the word on the authoritative grapevine is that it’s coming here “Real Soon Now”. It’s under testing, and you can see ‘eduroam’ SSIDs around the place already.

I’m really looking forward to this. I experience the net as pervasive at the moment, since I have wifi all over work and home, which is pretty much everywhere I might want it. Except when I find myself somewhere like an airport, hotel or railway station … there’s Wifi, but suddenly I have to pay some extortionate rate for it. Or – at other Universities – consider resorting to a flagrant breach of the JANET T&Cs to get at it in less than the six weeks an offical application for local login credentials might take.

It’s great to have an extension to the almost-there pervasive network! One day, mark my words, there’ll be free-at-the-point-of-use wifi everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. Which is a much easier target.

Light Laptops

I’ve just noticed – after reading yet another person rave about how desperately light it is – that the legendary MacBook Air weighs more – at 1.36 kg – than my current work laptop, a Samsung Q40 at 1.14 kg.

The Q40 is nice and light but it’s not that light compared to what I’d thought from the puff the Macbook Air was! Maybe I don’t want one after all. (!)

The Elonex – one for the reject pile

My colleague Will has been looking at the Elonex One. He says

It’s being targetted as the one for education. I however am not so convinced but I’m hoping to get my hands on one to try out shortly.

It looks like a pile of pants to me, to be honest, but I should reserve judgement until I’ve seen the beast for real. I’m always suspicious of technology specifically ‘for education’ – it’s usually overpriced and rubbish compared to the open market. Elonex, RM and Viglen PCs all spring to mind here.

I can’t quite say what’s different compared to the Asus Eee, that means RM gets my vote here and Elonex doesn’t. It does seem the wrong side of a significant line. Perhaps it’s the line between value engineering and cost-cutting.

Anyway, on the more upbeat side Will mentions the new touch-screen Eee (which I think is very exciting) and remarks:

Anyhow I think that the Eee and one and other such devices are set to bring mobile computing to a much larger audience.

He’s right. I’d say the iPod touch is another device along those lines. As I mentioned last year, things like the Eee and the iPod touch offer a qualitatively different experience of the web, and can give you a daily vision of what the future will be like all over the place.

(And it’s so easy, too – the iPod touch is so astonishingly usable that my 18-month-old son sussed out how to unlock it.)

JIME: The Once and Future Future of Academic Publishing

I’ve just been to a meeting about the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, or JIME.

I’d been vaguely thinking that I may or may not be on the Editorial Board of it, but the meeting has usefully confirmed that I am as of this afternoon actually one of the three core Editors along with my colleagues Patrick and Will.

In 1996 it was a very exciting new development in academic publishing – it aimed, inter alia:

Through its innovative use of interactive Net-based media, to be an action research project which explores the changing face of journals, and more broadly, scholarly practice in the age of digital publishing and communication.

(Ouch. The site uses frames! Making linking to that aims page hard. Oh dear.)

It had a cool new idea about being a proper journal but freely available online, and about the reviewing happening in the open. After an initial quick ‘threshold’ review, the article appears, the reviewers make comments, and the authors respond. All in the open.

Alas, the current technical system to support all that is Broken. And not fixable for boring reasons, on top of the reason that fixing an out-of-date kludgy system that you didn’t build is a deeply boring task. Things have rather moved on from 1996.

So we need to do Something. We had some fun (and despair) thinking about what. I think we have two main principles for the journal:

Firstly, we definitely want a Proper Academic Journal. That clearly still has value, and is part of what JIME always was and could be. So that means a proper Editorial Board, and proper reviewing. And – note to self – proper indexing in major citation indeces, which indirectly probably means a regular publishing schedule, which is a serious – but not insurmountable – tension for a very-rapid publication model. (e.g. it might be possible to come up with a hybrid where things appear as ‘accepted’ as soon as they are, and then every four months we create an ‘issue’ which formally moves any and all currently accepted articles to ‘published’.)
Secondly, we want to continue to explore new, more open ways of doing that – being open access is a minimum. So teaming up with a publisher (which would get our hands on their lovely money to support the process) isn’t likely to be an obvious big win (since it would be extorted from academic libraries by means that would prevent us being openly available). I don’t know what our current licensing agreement with authors is – implicitly it must involve permission for open access – but that might want upgrading to a CC licence.

The current sketchy idea is to use Open Journal Systems (OJS) for the nuts-and-bolts of the threshold review and the publication process, then some cunning system where the reviewers post their review in their own blogs (opening up that process much more widely in a very interesting new way), and JIME picks that up via trackbacks. Ideally we’d do something clever where the initial submission appears in the author(s)’s blog(s) too, as well as their response/revised final article. Should be pretty easily do-able … just needs the time fiddling with OJS.

There’s much more we could do, it’s just thrashing out what it should be – and convincing people that it has value and then getting the resource to do it (!). We talked about deeper issues – in particular, Patrick’s fine theory that Word has set academic publishing back decades by inhibiting structured authoring and referencing, which were solved problems by the late 80s.

But following the Web 2.0 philosophy, we should do the least that would work as soon as we can, and build towards the bigger vision, rather than waiting to build the whole thing in one huge leap.

It is fun being a (small!) part of the revolution in academic publishing. We’re also looking to refresh the Editorial Board as part of this revamp – anyone interested in joining us?

The video future is here

… just not evenly distributed, as William Gibson almost said. But it’s just got that little bit more widely distributed.

About six months ago I said that the DRM battle in video hadn’t really got started, and complained about the BBC’s choice of DRM for its iPlayer. That’s an awfully long time ago in Internet time.

Things have just got a lot better. The BBC has opened up iPlayer for the iPhone and the iPod touch. You just go to the site in Safari and it works!

Even better, as Cory Doctorow points out at Boing Boing, this means that iPlayer content is available in DRM-free versions – all you have to do is change your browser’s user agent string to claim to be an iPhone. (If you’re interested in the technicalities, Anthony Rose has a great explanation.)

This is a huge step on the way to video being available when and how you want it, in the way we’re getting used to audio being available.

We’ve a long way to go, of course. Bandwidth is still a bottleneck. (On the iPhone, you must be on a Wifi network – the phone network won’t work.) Storage likewise. And the content is still patchy – most of the programmes on the iPlayer site aren’t (yet?!) available like this, and the BBC is just one source of video. And the interface isn’t fantastic – you only find out whether a programme is available when you try to play it.

But it’s fantastic to be able to see what are still quaintly called TV broadcasts on my iPod touch, on demand, in impressively high resolution – way better than most YouTube videos. Strange the effect that new technologies have on you – I’ve never have predicted that I’d be so excited to see Jeremy Clarkson’s ugly mug.

Biodiversity Observatory – social networking for natural history

I’m heavily involved in the Biodiversity Observatory project. It’s part of Open Air Laboratories (OPAL), a huge (£12m) project funded by the Big Lottery Fund with ambitious goals to develop and engage a whole new generation of environmentalists. We’re not supposed to create a big media splash about OPAL yet until our media team are in place so we can make a very big deal about it, but I’m sure a little blog post here and there is worth it. The project includes the Natural History Museum, the National Biodiversity Network, the Field Studies Council, Imperial College and many others. There’ll be a network of regional activities to draw people in, led by regional universities.

I’m working with two of my colleagues – Will and Richard – who have blogged about this already. Will recently discussed the reputation management system, as did Richard. Richard’s entire blog is about the development of the site, plus the Evolution Megalab which is strongly linked.

Our job is to specify, develop and test the Biodiversity Observatory site. The tagline is that it’s a social networking site for Natural History. The aim is to draw in people who are interested in – say – the butterflies in their garden – and connect them up with a learning community, some appropriate resources, and the expert society for the area.

It’s a really interesting project. It’ll be big, too. With my professional hat on, there’s the social networking side, and the intersection of informal and formal learning. The mass audience will be very much learning-for-fun people, but there will be two OU courses to link up with it: a short level 1 course on Neighbourhood Nature, and bigger second-level course on biodiversity. And there’s the chance to play a small, indirect role in helping to save the planet, which is always a nice to have thing on a project.

Today I was talking to Richard about what we should use as the platform for the site. We’ve ruled out building it from scratch (the timetable is too short), and even building it in a framework like Symfony would be a huge job. We want something open, and we strongly prefer PHP. We are probably going to go for a more full-featured open source project that does most of what we want out of the box, and as Richard says, we are looking at Elgg very closely at the moment. We’re also considering things like Drupal or WordPress, or CMSes like e107 and Joomla! (which! reminds! me! of! Yahoo! coverage! in! The! Register!). And even Moodle, but that’s looking very unlikely.

So it’s interesting that today saw the announcement of two new offerings that could be relevant.

The first is Google Sites, which seems at a glance to be yet-another site-building-site, but has Google momentum and some of the Google Nature so isn’t to be dismissed entirely out of hand.

The second is Wikia has released some of its social networking tools, which sit inside Mediawiki, the wiki software behind Wikipedia and a host of other community-edited sites.