Camelot: A Charmless Making

There is something wrong about Camelot, the new TV telling of the Arthurian Legend. 

It could be the stilted acting, it might be the anachronistic language of the script, perhaps it is the fact that Eva Green always makes me feel a little ill (I swear that woman has a touch of the fey about her), or horror or horrors could it be that the whole Arthurian Legend is now a bit tired? After all, we've been enjoying the BBC's Merlin (a kind of Arthurian Grange Hill) which is fun in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, and Spam-a-lot is still playing in the West End, so perhaps we've just had enough of Camelot (after all, it is a silly place).

Or maybe there are bigger and better stories to be told these days. The Guardian suggested that Camelot is a sort of S Club Game of Thrones Juniors, and I agree that Game of Thrones is certainly in a different league, but surely Arthur comes before Stark? After all Malory predates Martin by 800 years or so. Yes, the tropes are a bit tired now, but they are Malory's tropes to begin with, and they speak to something true.

So what is wrong with Camelot?

For me this production never had a chance, because no matter what they do they could never be anything but a pale imitation of the Arthurian film to rule them all (no, not the bloody Hobbit films - they owe Malory too). The film I'm talking about is John Boorman's Excalibur, by my reckoning the greatest fantasy film ever made.

Excalibur realises that it is not telling a history, but a legend that is an echo of history, something that is a distillation of our collective memory. Its Anglo-Saxon knights thunder to war in Gothic armour, and celebrate their victories in Norman halls. But it is easy to forgive. It's a story filled with archetypes, the women are mother's, lovers, witches and wives; it's men mythic. And Excalbur? Well she is an emerald blade of perfection and the screen literally hums in her presence.

Fiennes may well grow into his role as Merlin, but Nichole Williams (complete with mirrored steel skullcap) is Merlin and gives a suitable inhuman performance. Jamie Campbell Bower may grow a beard, but he could never show as well as Nigel Terry how a simple man can make a great king. And Eva Green may be lovely (in a squeasy, bad-for-you sort of way), but she lacks the fierce arrogance of Helen Mirren's Morgana. 

So as I watched them ride about, roll around and generally make a lot of noise, I couldn't help hoping that the dragon's breath might rise and transform them into Excalibur instead.

Anál nathrach,

orth’ bháis’s bethad,

do chél dénmha

You can steal the charm of making, but be careful that the magic doesn't run out.

The Poor Elite

So the government is shocked and surprised that Universities want to use the new fees system to recover all the money they lost through the HE funding cuts. Most V-Cs seem to think that a charge of 7.5k to 8k would allow them to balance the books again, and many of the UKs stronger Unis think that its an opportunity to charge a prestigious 9k and effectively get an extra 1k per student to improve the student experience (after all, if they didn't students would be paying 5k more for the same old same old).

I suspect that deep down we all feel the same way about the Coalition

But the government has also attached a caveat that Unis that want to charge the maximum amount must demonstrate that they are admitting more students from poorer background and thus widening access.

I'm all for this, Universities are one of the big engines of social mobility (that's one of the reasons they are deserving of public money) - but I hate the way that the question is posed, as if Admissions Tutors were devilishly working to exclude all the poor people, racked with snooty laughter as they tossed the state school UCAS applications into the reject bin.

Well, I'm a Senior Admissions Tutor and run our Computer Science Admissions process alongside a small team of colleagues - and I deeply resent the government's tone and implication. It's disingenuous to what is one of the last truly meritocratic processes left in our country and hides what the government is actually asking Universities to do - which is to apply policies of positive discrimination.

I want to be clear, I'm not against positive discrimination, it has its place in overturning prejudice. But I also want to be clear that in this case there is no prejudice. The fact is that if you meet our standard offer then we will offer you a place, it doesn't matter who you are, what colour, age, sexuality or class, good grades will get you in. The problem happens before people get to the University, the problem is that who you are impacts on your ability to get good grades at School.

We can try and fix this problem - it involves pumping more money into the state school system, reducing class sizes and increasing the variety of education given to children. Teachers know this, they are professionals and do the best with what they are given, but I suspect that politicians don't want to acknowledge it.

We can give up and live with it - after all no matter how much money you throw in it will always be possible for the richest people in society to pay more, and thus one supposes, to get a better experience.

We can patch up the cracks and ask Universities to positively discriminate (to correct the effect rather than solve the cause) - this gives the Universities a difficult balancing job to do and also means that some students starting at the same University will be stronger than others (and of course that some weaker students will be chosen over stronger ones). Such is the nature of positive discrimination.

Elitism and meritocracy are unavoidable linked - especially since in a national context it is impossible to guarantee everyone the same opportunity to demonstrate their merit - so there's a good debate to be had here. But we're not going to get it if the government continues to dodge the issue by implying that University Admissions are the problem that needs to be fixed. They aren't.

Chasing EdShare: In Pursuit of a Usable Teaching and Learning Repository

The last five years or so has been an incredible time to be involved in e-learning. We've seen the rise and demise of the Digital Native, the flight and delight of students and academics to Web 2.0 systems, and the attempted murder of the VLE (we now know that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated). In our work in the Learning Societies Lab we've played our own small part in that dramatic change through the radical overhaul of teaching and learning repositories, the rejection of traditional Learning Objects and the promotion of Open Educational Resources (OER).

The result of that effort is an unassuming piece of software called EdShare, itself an extension to EPrints (one of the world's most successful research repositories). EdShare was funded by JISC through a number of projects and is used by the University of Southampton for its own teaching and learning repository, but its also the software behind the HUMBox, is being used by the OU, will be the repository for the BLOODHOUND Supersonic Car project, and is in place or being planned for at least another ten institutions.

But the technology itself is nothing special, it's the ideas and the philosophy behind it that make it work and I thought it was worth explaining why EdShare looks the way it does.

What is a Repository For?

Our key revelation in developing EdShare came several years ago when (after a few false starts) it became obvious that the traditional approach (digitally packaged teaching resources described using Learning Object metadata) was not working for everyday teachers. The overheads were huge, the upload process complex and the benefits to the people required to do the work (teachers and lecturers) unclear. This was 2007 and we asked ourselves how come people were prepared to upload photos and videos to emerging public sites like Flickr and Youtube, but they couldn't be bothered to share their teaching resources. What do those sites offer that teaching and learning repositories don't?

The problem was that we were translating the research repository model to learning resources, and it didn't fit. Research repositories are about archiving things that are at the end of their lifecycle, users like this archiving service - it's valuable to them. They get a safe, permanent, official and above all highly visible home for their precious work. It's a clear gain for a researcher, and means that they will make the effort to upload.

But who wants to archive their teaching resources? Teaching resources are living things that breath with the passing of each academic year, they evolve and can be rough around the edges. Archiving them is the last thing you want to do!

For inspiration we examined those Web 2.0 sites more carefully and asked ourselves the question - what services do they offer?

We came up with three key things, and decided to make these the underpinning services of our new repository. Based on these services we designed a number of extensions to EPrints that transforms it from an archiving repository to a living-breathing learning and sharing system.

Hosting

The first thing we noticed was that all barriers to uploading had to go - and that includes all that complex Learning Object metadata. It's nice to have, but the main service is to give people an online storage space, and to allow them to see their work in the browser, describing that work is (at best) of secondary importance. That inline browser view simultaneously turns the repository into a social media platform, whilst also negating the major need for most of the metadata - why read about the resource when you can see it right in front of you?

To make this a reality we implemented an inline preview tool that uses a whole bunch of behind the scenes converters to make whatever you upload visible. It manages images, audio, video, pdfs and (crucially) MS Office files like Word and Powerpoint. Seeing is believing, imagine how god-awful YouTube would be if you had to download every video you wanted to see and mess around installing codecs before you could watch it.

Organisation

Secondly we decided that the system should allow people to manage their resources in the way that they see fit - rather than requiring them to package them up in predetermined ways. This means being open about what can be uploaded, but also means giving people mechanisms to organise it once its uploaded.

To enable this we implemented free tagging and collections. Collections allow people to create a list of resources and give them a name and a description. In return they get a decent presentation page and a url that they can circulate or stick on their web page. Tags are in effect a kind of open-ended public collection, but they are also easy and familiar.

Community

The final service is to help build community by putting the people back into the repository. This doesn't have to be extreme, it doesn't mean reinventing Facebook, instead you can build community through the sharing mechanisms of the repository itself by simply providing a profile page that gathers together all of one person's efforts in the repository, and making sure that uploaders are aware of the activity (the attention metadata) around their items.

We created a profile system (called MePrints) that gathers together all of the information about a user in one place. The profile acts as both a homepage for users and as an identity page for others who get to see who this person is through their activity in the repository. Simple profile widgets such as an event feed show users what activity is happening around their resources, and giving people feedback and encouragement is the best way to keep them engaged.

The EdShare Philosophy

Perhaps the main way to view what we did with EdShare is to see it as an attempt to create a system that actually is valuable to users, rather than the institution. That doesn't mean that the institution doesn't see value - enough to fund the thing for a start - but if users don't benefit then they wont come, no matter how many times you build it.

EPrints Services now offer EdShare as one of their supported packages and the software itself is available as Open Source, but there are still challenges ahead and EdShare is really just a start. Once we have people adding and sharing content then we need to ensure that others can find it easily, that they can repurpose it, and that the act of repurposing - we call it remixing - is known to the original authors so it reinforces community and leads to further engagement.

We also have to deal with the complex ecology of repositories that is evolving - what is the relationship between the institutional repository and the VLE, what about iTunesU or community repositories? At Southampton we are exploring this by looking at how EdShare sits alongside Blackboard, and by using EdShare as a platform to promote content into iTunesU (so we view EdShare as a working, but transparent, learning content system and ITunesU as a showcase site for the best of the Universities learning material).

So if you are considering creating a teaching and learning repository for your institution then I wish you the best of luck. But remember, sharing is good, but altruism alone wont build your repository. To make it work, you have to make it useful.

You can read more about EdShare in the following pubs:

• Davis, H., Carr, L., Hey, J., Howard, Y., Millard, D., Morris, D. and White, S. (2010) Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 3 (2). pp. 96-109.
• Millard, D. E., Davis, H. C., Howard, Y., McSweeney, P., Francois, S., Morris, D., Ramsden, M. and White, S. (2010) MePrints: Building User Centred Repositories. In: 5th International Conference on Open Repositories, 6-9 July 2010 , Madrid, Spain. (In Press)
• Millard, D. and Howard, Y. (2010) Towards an Ergonomics of Knowledge Systems: Improving the Design of Technology Enhanced Learning. In: European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, Sept 28 - Oct 1, 2010, Barcelona (Spain).
• Millard, D., Howard, Y., McSweeney, P., Arrebola, M., Borthwick, K. and Varella, S. (2009) Phantom Tasks and Invisible Rubric: The Challenges of Remixing Learning Objects in the Wild. Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning . (In Press)
• Millard, D., Howard, Y., McSweeney, P., Borthwick, K., Arrebola, M. and Watson, J. (2009) The Language Box: Re-imagining Teaching and Learning Repositories. In: International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, July 14-18, 2009, Riga, Latvia.
• Millard, D., Howard, Y., Wills, G., Watson, J. and Arrebola, M. (2008) Towards an Open Repository of Teaching Resources. In: Open Repositories Conference 2008 (OR2008), 1st-4th April 2008, Southampton, United Kingdom

How To Vote

So later this year the UK will go to the polls for a referendum on changing our voting system. It will be the first national referendum since 1975. It will also be a massive waste of time and money.

Now if we were proposing changing the voting system to something with real constitutional bite - like the Single Transferable Vote (STV, a form of proportional representation) - we should have a referendum. The STV would really change politics in the UK. Because votes are cast into a pool of candidates it breaks the direct link between a single voter and their MP, and because it better reflects the true split of the national vote it would mean more MPs for minority parties and thus increase the likelihood of coalition government. By the way, if you want a vote system primer you could do worse than the Electoral Reform Society (not really impartial, but I forgive them :-)

But we're not being asked to decide on STV. Instead what we have proposed is the Alternative Vote system (AV). The AV system is really just a modest improvement on First Past the Post (FPTP). The advantages are that no candidate is elected with less than 50% support, it also reduces the need for tactical voting because if a voters first choice is eliminated (because they don't have enough votes on the first pass) then their vote automatically moves to their second choice.

So why am I against a referendum? It's because AV is an absolute no-brainer. It improves our current system with no adverse effects, and no real implication for our system of government. The government should introduce AV through normal parliamentary process. A referendum is a waste of money.

Except, unbelievably, there is a 'No' campaign. Their arguments are interesting as a study of the way in which you can argue from a weak position using rhetorical tricks. Let's take a look at them:

A screen shot of the NOtoAV argument

1) "AV breaks the principle of one person one vote, because supporters of fringe parties end up having their vote counted several times while supporters of mainstream parties only have their vote counted once" - this is wrong, and plays on a lack of understanding of how the AV algorithm works. In AV there are multiple rounds of voting and in each round everyone's vote is counted. Its just that some people's vote changes, and others do not. Nobody ends up with more votes than anyone else.

2) "Under AV the candidate that comes in third place can end up winning." - this is misleading and when properly expanded it becomes clear that it is nonsensical. The candidate that would have come third under FPTP can certainly end up as the winner under AV, but it's equally true to say that under FPTP the candidate that finishes in third place under AV will end up winning. This argument therefore presupposes that FPTP is the right system.

3) "People have a right to know where their vote goes" - yes they do. And that has nothing to do with the voting system. They will know equally well under AV as with FPTP. Making clearly true assertions is a nice way to make your argument seem reasonable, but it only actually helps if it helps differentiate between the options.

4) "Voters themselves should decide who the best candidate is, not the voting system." - this is a false dichotomy, voters always use the voting system to jointly decide who wins, there is no option where the voting system does not determine the winner. FPTP is as guilty as this as AV. Many MPs have been elected with a minority of votes under FPTP because the voting system has yielded that result. Oxymoronic statements are not helpful.

5) "AV is a politician's fix, taking power away from voters and allowing the Liberal Democrats to choose the government after each election. The only vote that really counts under AV is Nick Clegg's." - wow, where did that come from? It's simply not true, and is clearly designed to play to certain fears (including that attempt to link AV with politicians - not the most popular group at the moment!). AV is a form of improved FPTP, it will not result in increased likelihood of coalition (presumably what they are referring to).

6) "Our current tried and tested voting system delivers clear outcomes and everyone's vote is equal." - see point 3 above. This statement is also true of AV.

7) "One person, one vote is the fairest way to elect an MP and the most democratic way to choose a government." - again this is also true of AV (each person still ends up with 1 vote). I assume they are trying to reinforce point 1 above.

8) "AV is complicated and expensive. Only three countries use the complicated system - Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea - and Australia has compulsory voting to make sure people turn up." - saying complicated twice doesn't make it true, and trying to create a connection between Australian compulsory voting and AV is cheap and misleading (there is no evidence to suggest that AV is a cause for that law). AV isn't complicated. Most children can list their preferences, I suspect many adults will have retained the same skill. This also ignores the many other types of elections that use AV (including USA mayoral elections, Irish presidential elections and many trade union elections).

It's as easy as ABC!

9) "AV would also be expensive, requiring councils to spend more time and money on vote counting, which would increase your council tax." - at last, something that is partially true. although I still think this is misleading. AV would be more expensive that FPTP but its not clear to me that it would be radically more expensive or time consuming. Australia still seems to manage the count in one night for example. Cost is a consideration, but its not a deal breaker. After all, not holding an election would be cheaper, but we still all seem to think its worth having one.

10) "AV is a big change, so you need to make sure that you have read the small print before voting on 5 May." - why is moving to AV a big change exactly? You haven't made this case, so please don't pretend that you have. And what's this small print that you are mentioning? Can it be a negative reference to make people afraid (see 'complicated' from point 8).

I hate all this weaseling around, it's all so much obfuscation and sophistry. I like a good debate as much as the next person, but there has to be something to debate about. The danger with this referendum is that it will have nothing to do with the voting system, and everything to do with the current political context. Are the Conservatives using it to gerrymander constituency boundaries? Does a vote for AV help or hinder a greater goal for proportional representation?

If we had the balls we'd make this a referendum on AV vs. STV - those are the two best systems for delivering either singular or consensus government. Even better let's have our cake and eat it. Use AV for MPs and STV for the Lords. That way we get strong government with a check and balances second house that represents the popular vote.

Other than the Greeks, Sumerians, Indians, a smattering of other Europeans and arguably the Americans, we bloody well invented democracy. Surely it's about time we got it right :-/