rebarbarised

Please could you give me feedback on this draft

If you could give me any comments or other feedback on this draft article by Thursday, I'd be very grateful! I've written it for the newsletter of the Association for Learning and Technology, so the audience is mostly learning technology professionals in Higher Education and Further Education.

Comments welcome either in the comments field below or by email to me, david at alchemi-dot-co-dot-uk. Many thanks!

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Like the future, the impact of a colder climate is not evenly distributed. I guess there must be some areas where current economic challenges are experienced as business-as-usual, plus some pressure to trim a bit of excess fat. But many of the people I speak to have a sense that we are going through — or just heading into — a period that is qualitatively different from the cyclical ebbs and flows that education has gone through over the past decades.

My sample is in no way balanced of representative but last year I interviewed people involved in learning from a home educator to a university professors, and from a social software entrepreneur to a photographer who is committed to helping people learn yet refuses to see this as teaching (recorded on my blog, and collated in abridged form in a self-published newspaper). I was trying to do two things: to get a sense of what might be common across these different contexts, and to get a sense of the longer sweep of change, beyond the horizon of recent funding cuts.

Changes bred of necessity and opportunity

This article is a reflection on what I am calling "agile learning", drawing on some of the themes that emerged from these interviews. Hopefully this term is fairly self-explanatory: agility involves letting learners manage, direct and adapt their learning with minimum constraint. It is not intended as another packaged solution, with proprietary paraphernalia of trademarks and methodologies; more an umbrella term to allude to the particular kinds of invention that are bred of necessity in a challenging climate.

Over the space of 10-20 years, learning activities that were once marginal and supplementary will move into the mainstream as institutions lose their historical monopoly on the capability to process and share resources. We are already seeing what self-organising groups can accomplish with powerful tools but without formal lines of command.

What happens if and when the resources in the commons outstrip those controlled by gatekeepers as a matter of course? If Wikipedia is seen in some quarters as an irritant — its use to be cautioned and policed – imagine how learning might feel if the wiki model were to pass a tipping point, and classrooms to be seen as rare and peripheral events.

Twitter trending: propagation and influence

From the abstract of this HP Labs research paper:

In this paper, we conduct an intensive study of trending topics on Twitter and provide a theoretical basis for the formation, persistence and decay of trends. We also demonstrate empirically how factors such as user activity and number of followers do not contribute stronglyto trend creation and its propagation. In fact, we find that the resonance of the content with the users of the social network plays amajor role in causing trends.

The last point is the main thing I wanted to see elaborated. I'm not sufficiently bothered about this area to get to grips with the maths in the middle of the paper, so I just skipped to the Trend-Setters and Conclusions sections. The researchers explain how they identified Twitter users who initiate the largest number of trending topics, and the process of propagation, mainly through retweeting.

From the conclusion:

When we considered the impact of the users of the network, wediscovered that the number of followers and tweet-rate of users are not the attributes that cause trends.

So it's not that there's a master-race of Influentials who call the tune that the masses dance to.

What proves to be more important in determining trends is the retweets by other users, which is more related to the content that is being shared than the attributes of the users.

The message is important, and some messages resonate more than others. There's a hint here, which Mark Earls I'm sure would want to draw out, that being able to see what resonates with others could be a major factor in amplifying one's sense of how important an issue is, and may influence one's likelihood of retweeting it oneself. A herd effect.

Finally,

Furthermore, we found that the content that trended was largely news from traditional media sources, which are then amplified by repeated retweets on Twitter to generate trends.

So Twitter hasn't completely usurped the usefulness of mainstream media, and the two coexist in a new ecology. Big surprise.

Another petition

This one's pretty self-explanatory. Sign here. UK citizens only, as it's UK government business.

Recently it was announced that National Archives are converting their stock of electronic documents into Microsoft Open XML format. This format is not supported outside of Microsoft's own products and ties the public to purchasing Microsoft Office should they wish to view the products, which is a cost of around £80-120 depending on version. It also ties a user to puchasing Microsoft Windows which is a cost of roughly £150 for the Basic edition or purchasing a new PC with Windows which is a cost of at around £200 for a new machine. Instead Open Document Format which is an accepted ISO standard unlike Open XML should be used. Open Document Format is supported on many major platforms and is freely available at no charge. It include all the necessary features for documents otherwise it would not be the ISO standard. There should not be a £250 charge to use Microsoft for accessing the National Archives electronically especially in light of the companies ongoing litigation with the EU regarding its anti-competitive actions.

Where do they get those names?

I've just had a spam message purporting to be from John Le Mesurier. 

Where and how do spammers research these names? Is there evidence that people are more likely to open a message from a warmly-regarded comic actor who's been dead for a quarter of a century?

And if there is, what does that say about us?

(p.s. try imagining the words "Horny blonde perverts getting wild and horny in gangbang play opera" being spoken by John Le M -- it's not easy, is it?)

Kids of tomorrow

2 year old Baby Anna loves Coldplay on iPhone

There are two lessons from this clip. The positive, encouraging one concerns the design of a user interface so intuitive that a 2-yr-old can find her way round it through trial and error, and so robust that parents can trust them to do so. Technology has indeed moved forward in the last couple of decades.

The more worrying aspect is the shocking evidence of parents conditioning their offspring to select, and 'dance' to, Coldplay. The technology to undo the harm this will cause in future decades has yet to be invented.

Leveraging brand equity to better improve our monetisation of user-generated assets

Corporate jargon... where do I start?

Every verb has to be preceded by 'better' (and if that involves splitting an infinitive, so much the better). No one in corporate life just does something. No one just does something well. No, you must do something better.

Here's one from everyone's favourite whipping boy strategic leader and eloquent visionary, Bill Gates, "Maybe they'll tell us how we can better improve our products."

Better improve? As opposed to worse improve?