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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…
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Web 2.0 usage at Oxford
Those good people at TALL have done a survey of web 2.0 usage amongst their distance ed students. Dave White blogs about it, with a link to the results. Here are some things I took from it: Overall web 2.0 usage isn’t as high as you might think given how much some of us talk about it. I don’t think this should be that surprising, and before all the naysayers cry ‘told you so!’ it is worth noting that for some tools it is very high, and it is going to grow rapidly (for example, imagine if this survey had come out a year ago and had included YouTube). There…
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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…
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Blogs as organisational dialogue
I know the idea of blogs as the new knowledge management tool isn’t new, but it came home to me last week when we (some people from the OU with an interest in broadcasting) had a days workshop with some BBC people. Actually getting together with some of the smart, techie people there was really useful. But, as ever, the problem comes in how to move things forward. It seems clear to me that the commissioning model that applies to traditional broadcasting doesn’t work in the new context. Our overlap was more in areas of R and D than in creating specific programmes. However, the last thing you want to…
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FLOSS summer school
I spent Monday and Tuesday hosting a meeting of the FLOSScom project at Milton Keynes (I always have some sympathy for European partners – while Milton Keynes has its virtues, I’m sure it struggles to compare with Porto or Thessaloniki where our partners are). One of the deliverables (in EU project speak ‘workpackages’) is a summer school which both aims to demonstrate the principles of how learning in open source communities occurs and also to be about these communities, ie it is FLOSS in both subject and process. One of the differences between FLOSS projects and much of education is that in FLOSS you have a definite project that you…
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BBC Jam: Too successful for their own good
I spent yesterday in a meeting with the BBC where we were discussing changes to both the OU and the BBC brought about by the internet. It was very interesting, but also really challenging as there seem to be fundamental changes required to how both organisations operate. And then today I hear that BBC Jam, an online educational service for 5- 16 year olds, has been suspended. It has been suspended not because it was a failure or through lack of interest, but because several commercial companies complained that it was harming their business. So rather than have to respond with a better product, they simply get the site shut…
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My Amazon ranking – whipped by the long tail
Looking at your books ranking in Amazon can be a mildly obsessive pastime, like checking your Technorati rating (465,937 since you ask). In Amazon yesterday I had risen to the giddy heights of 9,432. To put that in context Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is 97, Moby Dick is 1,428 and Perec’s Life A User Manual is 639,483. But before I could purchase the yacht, it seems my fantasies of retirement were scuppered by the long tail. Sales fall off very quickly after the first 1000 or so, as this article explains. So at around 10,000 it is selling 11 copies every 5 days. It’d have to be…
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Some long tail in education thoughts
The Long Tail concept crops up in a few things I am working on, such as the broadcast strategy, and web 2.0 approaches to content, so here are some thoughts on what it means in education (primarily distance and e-learning). New course economics. If the blockbuster is dead (or at least not as significant as it was), then the Fordist model of distance education course production needs revising. There has been talk of a post-Fordist model for a long time, but I think we haven’t really changed the model fundamentally. In a long tail world lots of small population courses might be the way to go, which means the economics…
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Last.uni
I’m a big fan of LastFM, and whenever I find some technology I like, I think ‘what would this be like in education?’. Let’s play the technology determinist game for a while, and imagine what would education (or even just a course) be like if it was built around something like Last.fm, would it be a Last.uni? Here’s how it might work. Imagine educators don’t create courses or give lectures but they create loads of resources: podcasts, articles, blog postings, animations, video clips, etc. Last.uni draws on all the databases where these resources are stored. In your Last.uni player you enter a subject you are interested in, lets say it’s…
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Web 2.0 course designs
I did a presentation yesterday to a group at the OU looking at new models of course design (the feeling is that what can be termed OU Classic is not a flexible enough model to meet all of our needs). I suggested 5 models: The self-updating course – the course designer creates general activities, for example ‘Analyse three of the resources below using X’s theory…’ The resources come from RSS feeds, user tagged content, etc. So the actual resources are unknown at the time of writing, but if the feeds are reliable they will be current when the student studies. The content-lite course – content produced by the course designer…
