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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…
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Guardian Online
I was up in London yesterday to have a meeting with Emily Bell, editor of Guardian Online. This was part of the broadcast review we are conducting at the OU. She had lots of interesting things to say, but perhaps what most struck me were the similarities between our organisations. For reluctant academics read entrenched journalists. There are concerns about maintaining a traditional market while reaching out for a new one, and the different quality demands in an online and print world, and also different styles of writing and working online. The Guardian solved some of these by setting up their online division as a separate business. I don’t think…
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Why you should love Zidane
Watched the world cup final last night which was of course marred/made memorable by Zidane’s headbutt and red card. I’ve been puzzling about this. He was about ten minutes away from being remembered as the greatest French player ever, probably overtaking Platini. And I think that is the key to his action. He could see the endless smug after dinner speeches, the fawning chat show appearances, the publicity work with Blatter and Chirac. It was a frightening epiphany. So he committed reputation suicide. Now he can enjoy his retirement in peace. You’ve got to admire that. More people should do it I think and save themselves from a kind of…
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The A word
I was looking at the draft theses of two of my PhD students last week. One is in the area of theoretical artificial intelligence, and particularly non-conceptual content. The other is in the area of learner experience and decision making. Two very different fields, but both had made use of the concept of affordances. This demonstrates one of two things: i) Affordances are such a powerful concept that they have application in multiple domains. ii) It has become so meaningless that you can apply them to any domain I have used the term myself quite a bit, and it crops up in my new book. Personally I find it a…
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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…
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Academic publishing – a rant
As I mentioned I had an article (The Distance from Isolation) accepted for publication in Computers and Education. It has now been ‘in press’ for over a year now, with no indication as to when it will actually be published. By the time it is, it will be out of date. I’m sure it’s not the case but it reminds me of Chelsea FC – they buy the best players not with an intention of playing them but simply to stop other teams having them. This is but one example of the very strange world of academic publishing. For those who don’t engage in it, the deal goes something like…
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Decentralisation of Higher Ed
John Naughton’s inaugural lecture last week reminded me of a paper I wrote about online communities Download distance_ho.doc (this is not a coincidence as some of the ideas in the paper were informed by a conversation I had with John once about the differences between broadcast media and the Net, and much of the knowledge of the net’s technical structure is derived from John’s book A Brief History of the Future). In it I argue that the key technological features of the internet are openness, decentralisation and robustness. These in turn became the social values of the internet also. If you want to know what technologies or approaches will succeed…
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The enthusiasm of the new convert
I was at the University of West England yesterday for a validation event. They are creating an online software engineering course. I was struck by the enthusiasm they had for e-learning in general. I forget that it can strike people this way. Back in 1999 I came across like some e-learning Billy Graham, but now I tend to think everyone knows it, or am wary of over-hyping it. But it was nice to be reminded of this. They were excited about how e-learning allowed them to do things they had always wanted to do, but the lecture format didn’t allow, for example getting students to do an activity immediately after…
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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…
