Technology

information & communication technology

Blogs are not a “substitute”

by

Print media are in dire trouble – but blogs are no substitute says Andrew Sullivan in the Times Online:

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy. Perhaps private philanthropists will step in and finance not-for-profit journalistic centres, where investigative and foreign reporting can be invested in and disseminated by blogs and online sites. Maybe reporter-bloggers will start rivalling opinion-mongers such as me and give the whole enterprise some substance. Maybe papers can slim down sufficiently to produce a luxury print issue and a viable online product. There’s always a hunger for news, after all.

I’m not a journalist nor a reporter and have no experience in mainstream media but I understand the Web and I think Sullivan gets it completely wrong. First of all, there is no such thing as a “one-man blog”, as all blogs are connected to other blogs and media. Also, blogs are not limited by print space, so articles can be much longer than print media offers and most have hyperlinks to more information. This is a richer reading experience, where facts can be checked while reading and engage the reader to do more than receive the wisdom imparted by the journalist. Comments and self-corrections keep blogs on-track, as opposed to corrections that appear in a newspaper the next day on page 12. What Sullivan proposes with a slimmed-down paper and online presence already exists with magazines, like FastCompany. On one thing I will agree; blogs are not a substitute for newspapers, they are an entirely new medium and are just starting to find their place after the initial exuberance.

Directly comparing print media with digital media is the wrong approach but is often heard in education as well. A webinar is not as rich as a classroom, or you cannot replace face-to-face interaction with the instructor, are common complaints. Digital media enable new kinds of relationships, some richer and some more limited, but the Web offers much that we did not have before. I am certain that democracy, and learning, can be enhanced with digital media, but we have to stop looking back with simplistic and direct comparisons, and get on with making our interconnected world work.

Short, medium and long-term views about the Internet

by

Is the Internet a new technology that we have to integrate into our ways of working and learning or is it a transformational way of communicating that will change our society forever? The approach from existing software vendors and established organisations is that Internet technologies can help you become more effective and efficient in your current business model through systems for collaborative work (e.g. Sharepoint) or online education (e.g. Blackboard).

Another view is that we are going through a transformation similar to what happened 100 years ago and that the Internet is like the industrial system and will significantly change how we spend our discretionary time (9 hours each day). Here are the predicted shifts from NineShift:

  1. People work from home.
  2. Intranets replace offices.
  3. Networks replace pyramids
  4. Trains replace cars
  5. Dense neighborhoods replace suburbs
  6. New social infrastructures evolve.
  7. Cheating becomes collaboration.
  8. Half of all learning is online.
  9. Education becomes web-based.

These are major changes and it’s hard to argue with most of these predictions, as in the last two years they’re pretty well all coming about. But is the Internet going to have an even greater impact on society? Mark Federman thinks so.

Federman sees the Internet and related electric media as the biggest change since the 16th century and describes it as epochal. According to his research, we are 150 years into a 300 year change into the electric age and the Internet is the point of acceleration of our shift from print-based communications to electric ones. The launch of the Netscape IPO occurred during the “break-boundary” between epochs.

All three perspectives have validity and can be useful. Yes, we can get efficiencies from these new technologies but they are having an impact on how we work and live that will be obvious in the next decade. We should also keep in perspective that life will be significantly different for our children and grand children, which is difficult for many of us to imagine. How could scribes imagine an age of literacy or an oral society watch as the written word extended power and control?

Combining the short, medium and long views may give us a better picture and a framework to help with the decisions we have to make today.

Photo by SMigol

Toward a Read-Write Society

by

With the election over and Bill C-61 dying with the last Parliament, the government is once again looking at making changes to copyright law. In A Copyright Call to Arms published in the Globe and Mail this week, the authors call for consultation from all sides of this complex issue:

Ministers Clement and Moore have a singular opportunity to consult with Canadians to develop reforms that will be fair for both consumers and rightsholders and position Canada for success in the 21st century.

I’ve just finished reading Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy by Lawrence Lessig and it should be required reading for all politicians involved in re-making copyright policy.

Lessig shows the differences between Read-Only (RO) and Read-Write (RW) cultures and how RO came to dominate in the 20th Century, while RW has been around for as long as humans have communicated with each other. An RW culture emphasizes learning. Lessig’s view is balanced and he does not call for the abolition of copyright but mostly for the removal of copyright protection from non-commercial uses. He uses US law to make his points, but much of what he says is applicable to other Common Law jurisdictions.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of current copyright laws is that they are making criminals out of an entire generation:

But the real failure of this war [on copyright violation] is the effect that this massive regulation has had on the basic integrity of our kids. Our kids are “pirates”. We tell them this. They come to believe it. Like any human, they adjust the way they think in response to this charge. They come to like life as a “pirate”. That way of thinking then bleeds. Like the black marketers in Soviet Russia, our kids increasingly adjust their behavior to answer a simple question: How can I escape the law?

It’s time to stop this madness and help our children become better citizens, not line the pockets of a few multinational corporations. Non-commercial copyright infringement should not exist and our educators should be leading on this issue. We don’t need special rights just for educational institutions, we need to encourage RW creativity for lifelong learning.

For further reading, see my bookmarks on copyright.

Portlets and widgits

by

My keynote at SkillSoft’s Canadian Perspectives conference yesterday gave some advice to the training department and how it may need to change to meet the demands of a complex environment. Several people said that they found the talk interesting and I will take the notes and feedback to write a paper on the topic which I should publish in a couple of weeks. All references to this presentation are on my Delicious bookmarks.

During the day I attended some breakout sessions, mostly focused on advancements in SkillSoft’s product and service lines as well as a few customer case studies. The first presentation of the day covered three market shifts that the company sees as having an impact on its business: mobile devices; ubiquity of content; and talent shortages.

I also noticed a theme that learning content has to move outside the LMS. The LMS is perceived as an appropriate tool for tracking objects but learning activities are being pushed outside the LMS box. SkillSoft’s strategy is to use an open (not open source) architecture to plug into other systems with “portlets”, which are similar to the web widgits that you see on most blogs today. It all reminded me of a discussion I had with Mark Dowds at the Brandon-Hall conference last year. Mark knows information technology but was new to e-learning. After a few days of presentations, Mark told me he had finally figured out what an LMS is, “It’s just another widgit”. It looks like that’s the way this technology is going.

Best open source social networking platform

by

I’ve been a fan of Elgg, the open source social networking platform, since I first saw it. Not only do I like the technology but also its underlying framework of user-centricty (which also means learner-centric). I came across Elgg while working on a project to support several professional communities of practice working in a health care region. We had tried some wikis and CMS’s but when we found Elgg (version 0.2 I believe) we finally had something that met most of our needs.

Advance four years and here’s what R/WW has to say in an interview with Dave Tosh, one of Elgg’s founders:

To that end, Elgg can help form the basis of a new generation of social networks. But their platform goes beyond just delivering a solution for the next web 2.0 hangout or social site, although that it a popular use for their software. The Enterprise 2.0 movement is also aided by Elgg as companies wanting to build and customize their own intranet-based social networks have begun to adopt the platform as well.

Dave explains why someone should consider Elgg:

I think there are three main reasons: simplicity, extensibility and openness. The basic version of Elgg is deliberately very simple and clean. Our architecture allows you to easily extend Elgg’s functionality to meet your specific requirements. [and for geeks] Lastly, we fully embrace open standards such as OpenDD, FOAF, RSS, Open Social and OpenID, allowing you to interact with other applications.

I’m very happy to see Elgg mature and continue to remain open in order to provide us with tools that don’t lock us in. As good as a service like Ning may be, you’re locked into their platform.

Tools of the Trade

by

I’ve been deep into making my technology work this week. One issue was web conferencing and we used Dimdim, which I’ve mentioned before. Dimdim is very simple to use, doesn’t require a plugin, is free for 20 users at a time and is open source. I really liked it but found the audio a bit weak and couldn’t get the video to work (probably a stupid-user issue). I also never figured out how to find a recording of the session (other than the chat text). That said, at least it worked with my Mac, as opposed to HP Virtual Rooms, which I could not even launch. And yes, I know that there are always many variables and perhaps the gerbils on my end were too slow. I also went back and checked out Vyew again, which has improved since I last used it and is still free. It’s a good option for web conferencing but the beta Voice/Webcam didn’t work with my Mac. I guess I’m now a member of visible minority on the Web.

For the online work I was doing this week, my MacBook has a definite advantage. I automatically get dual monitors when I plug in an external monitor. With several windows open – skype, web conferencing and reference documents, the LMS evaluations went quite smoothly; from my end anyway. If I only want to use the external monitor, I just close the lid on my MacBook and keep working. It doesn’t shut down as a Windows machine would.

I also re-learned several lessons about presentations, but that’s for another day.

Open Up

by

Martin Weller mulls over the notion that the Open University or OU should call itself the Open U, with an emphasis on “open”:

  • Open Source
  • Open educational resources
  • Open API
  • Open content
  • Open courses
  • Open participation

In an inter-networked society, open is the only way to remain relevant. Most newspapers have realized this by opening their online versions. Closed archives don’t get the links from bloggers and others commenting on the news and so they get cut off from the global conversation. The Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course, with about 2,000 students is an example of  “openness”. Anyone can join, students can register for credit at the University of Manitoba, and folks like me can just lurk and learn informally.

One of the arguments against open models is that people need to get paid and openness usurps the pay-for-service model. Anyone working with open source software knows this is not correct and that money can be made around an open model. It’s just made in different ways and at different points in the value network.

I have promoted open source business models on this blog for almost five years and I’m finally starting to see some shifts in the educational market. I’m also quite certain that there’s still a lot of room for several variants on this business model, but competition for attention and relevance is increasing. If you’re in the education business, it’s time to open up.

Open Source; a better model for all of us

by

Dave Snowden relates an experience with Wikipedia where the inner circle decides that the actions of a user are not appropriate and he is subsequently banned.

I don’t know all of the details here, but my interest is in the underlying model of Wikipedia. There is a major difference between open source and a free Web service. Most open source projects can be forked, or moved in another direction by a sub-group of the community. An example is the Mozilla Browser fork that became the wildly successful Firefox project. They were able to take the source code and then get rid of all the redundant stuff in Mozilla and create a light and effective web browser.

It appears that Wikipedia can be forked [please correct me if my interpretation is wrong]. It would take a large amount of effort, but if enough people were outraged by the actions of the inner circle, a new project could be started.

The beauty of the open source model, of which there are several variants, is that it is more difficult for a project to be controlled by special interests. This is definitely something to consider as we use more and more web applications for education. For instance, should we use the free Ning platform, open source Drupal or proprietary SharePoint for our educational community of practice?

The peerless cloud

by

The Accidental Tourist voices his concerns with cloud computing, the web mot du jour (thanks Karyn):

… there is a Gartner report endorsing cloud computing. Then the very next paragraph states that the same organisation published a report warning of the dangers of cloud computing.

The stability of cloud computing was examined by Read/Write Web last week in light of recent GMail service outages. R/WW thinks that peer to peer may eventually subvert the cloud model.

You need $ gazillions to be a Cloud Computing Platform. Those server farms cost a lot. Skimping, or misjudging demand, leads to outages, slow response and other confidence-killers. This is a game for the big boys – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, AT&T, Sun.

R/WW describes four P2P platforms, of which I only know Skype, an application that I have been using and liking for several years. Another application they describe is Wuala, which offers P2P online storage. I checked it out but I’m not sure if I want my files stored on other people’s computers. You get 1GB for free and then can purchase more or share some of your space in return for some online storage. Personally, I prefer to use a cheap external hard drive or flash drive.

There is no single way that is best and I like to see new models being tested to usurp the big guys. It keeps everyone on their toes. However, if your data are important, you should know where they reside, as I said in Own Your Data. All of this has implications for training and education, especially as more organisations use Web 2.0 tools for learning.

Photo sharing

by

I’ve been playing a bit as a very amateur photographer and started a Flickr account when I purchased my first digital camera three years ago. I just upgraded to a Pentax Optio M50 which has a 5X optical zoom and I’m looking forward to some better wildlife photos. I also prefer that Pentax uses the much cheaper SD cards rather than the XD cards required for my last Olympus Stylus.

I’m looking at different online photo sharing services and am considering upgrading to a Flickr Pro account or perhaps changing to Photobucket or SmugMug. Any advice or opinions?

Update: I later came across this R/WW review of 10 Photo sharing services.