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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…
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The runner’s internet
I’m always intrigued by the way a particular community takes to new technology. I think it is in such communities that you see the unexpected uses, and where innovation lies – it’s where you are likely to find von Hippell’s ‘lead users’. As a (not very fast) runner, I think the running community’s use of technology is probably typical of this specialist development. Firstly, there is the community itself – for all those people who think that discussion on the internet is just teenagers flirting with each other, they should read the forums as Runners World. These are interesting, informed, insightful and intelligent (and lots of other words beginning with…
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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,…
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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.…
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The size of education
I had the final award board for a short course I created yesterday, T186 An Introduction to e-learning. It was a short (10 point) course, created as part of the short course programme in the Technology Faculty here. The course has gone along okay, but I think the short course programme hasn’t quite been the success we thought it might be. There was a feeling in distance education, particularly with the advent of e-learning, that perhaps the full 32 week, 60 point course was the wrong size of course, and shorter, more up to date courses might be the way to go. The jury is still out (there is a…
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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…
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Learning Design project
Had a meeting yesterday with the people from JISC, who are funding the D4LD project which I am project director for. Our colleagues from Liverpool Hope also came along and we had the OUNL on the telephone. The main aim of the project is to improve our Learning Design player, SLED, and the underlying Coppercore Learning design engine from the OUNL. We are doing this in the light of feedback from Liverpool Hope who are using the system on real live students on four courses. The improvements tend to fall in to three categories: Performance – this really degrades with a few users. We have found a few bottlenecks, probably…
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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…
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The Granularity of Ideas
I’ve finally got around to reading The Wisdom of Crowds. It’s enjoyable, and while I know lots of bloggers have retaliated with tales of the dumbness of crowds, but I think that misses the point. We know that crowds can be dumb, and become mobs, but what is interesting is when they become smarter than the smartest individual. Suriowecki claims that conditions need to be right for this to happen. What had put me off reading it though was that the title, or maybe the introduction, kind of told you all you needed to know. This is true of many popular business books that cross over to a general audience…
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The book manuscript leaves home
Today I finally managed to get the manuscript for my VLE book in the post. Well when I say manuscript what I actually mean is: 2 printed copies of manuscript Author questionnaire 2 compact discs containing files Folder containing 2 copies of all artwork Disc overview sheet Manuscript checklist It has probably taken me as long to do all the post-writing stuff as it did to write the thing in the first place. You appreciate that academic publishing operates on fine margins so a lot of the mundane work is pushed back to the author. I bet Dan Brown doesn’t have to do all this extra work. There is a…
