Last week I got myself a copy of the latest Metallica album (Death Magnetic). I've been following Metallica since the Autumn of 1991. That was a good year for rock; Nirvana's Nevermind, G'n'R's Use Your Illusions (I and II), and Metallica's Black Album stabbed a flag in the eye of 80's rock, and defined the genre for my generation (and launched Grunge and Thrash into the mainstream as well).
The Black Album is astonishingly good, but Metallica never really recovered from their success and it has remained a high point in their career. Of their albums since then, only S&M really merits a re-listen, and that's basically a greatest hits album (with generous doses of orchestral accompaniment).
Death Magnetic claims to recapture some of the magic of those glory days. The band has supposedly put their arguments behind them, and this is supposed to be a new start. This is supposed to be vintage Metallica.
So is it?
Well let's get something straight, Death Magnetic is no Black Album. When I first heard it I was a little disappointed, sure its not some good stuff on it, but nothing that matches the riff on Enter Sandman, nothing that gets under your skin like Nothing Else Matters, and nothing that has the anthemic qualities of Unforgiven. But as I have listened to it more and more, I've realised that actually this is still a really good album.
Its no Black Album - but then why should it be? This is a different band, a different time, and this is a different piece of work.
The band are obviously enjoying themselves, if you were being negative you might say that some of the songs go off the rails slightly and turn into a bit of a jam, but then you could just as easily say they are more complex - the album more textured - and that underneath the layers the quality might, just might, have returned.
Nirvana disbanded after Kurt Cobain's suicide in 1994, G'n'R were riddled with internal arguments and finally disintegrated in 1997, but Metallica carried on. There work may not have been as fine as it once once, but they carried on touring and making music, and I think that it has finally paid off.
Death Magnetic is its own album - and it's a return to a new form.
Metallica are possibly the finest metal band there has ever been. And now looking back at the Load's and Reload's I feel slightly St. Guilty :-/ After all, this is the band that produced the Black Album: so how could they be lost, when they had nowhere else to go?
Monday, October 6, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
How is the Semantic Web like Open Hypermedia?
Will history be kind to Open Hypermedia? The other day I gave a presentation on the Evolution of the Web to our new Masters students (part of their pre-sessional programme at Southampton) and I was forced to face an awkward thought. Open Hypermedia was an interesting side road of the Information Superhighway, but it wasn't a proper lane, or even a sliproad. Its something that you look wonderingly at as you cruise past on your full throttle Web 2.0 browser. A blip. For me its certainly a fun memory, but faced with explaining how we got from there to here - is it also an irrelevance?
I became involved in Hypertext research in the last year of my undergraduate degree when I undertook a project on the first implementation of the Open Hypermedia Protocol (OHP). Open Hypermedia was a pre-web idea that arose in the early 1990's and at its heart was the idea that you should seperate content and structure. Many hypermedia systems at the time embedded links in content (as in fact the web does with the HREF tag), Open Hypermedia Systems broke with this, and managed a separate linkbase, combining it with the content at runtime.
The result was hypermedia that could work on multiple type of media (video and audio, document files, etc.), that could be managed (so no dead ends), versioned, and which could present different linksets according to the situation - so early personalization. There were many OH systems (Microcosm, Chimera, HOSS, DHM, and Callimachus to name a few) and some were pretty sophisticated. But they were all swept away by the relentless rise of the Web, a process of technic cleansing that led Mark Bernstein to lament the death of strange hypertexts by 2001.
The Open Hypermedia Protocol was a good idea in the spirit of Web standards, but it was also a plaster over a mortal wound. Proposed in 1996 the idea was to get a number of these OH systems to follow the Web model and interoperate through simple open standards. OHP and the range of fantastic systems still standing by the late 90s inspired me to write my PhD on different models of hypermedia, but by the time of my doctoral graduation in 2001 it was clear that the game was up and Open Hypermedia was swept away like everything else.
I've recently been involved in a project to create an online Multimedia Annotation system (Synote). Because Synote deals with Multimedia the system has to hold its links separately from its content, and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to return to some of those lost OH principles in the age of Web 2.0.
The Synote design team began a process to create a hypertext model to sit behind a YouTube style front end, at first OH seemed a perfect fit, and we designed a model that supported a variety of traditional OH link structures (typed, n-ary, bi-directional, multi-model links) that could be used for annotation, subtitling, bookmarking, and a host of other activities.
However, as the weeks wore on it became obvious that there were some serious problems with an OH design: the issue is that OH holds the link model as sacred. The model is pushed up into the User Interface, and down into the Database, but in reality it is not a comfortable fit in either.
At the Database level it introduces run-time complexity. The OH model is very flexible, but contains many internal references (as it is stuffed full of first class elements). As a result it takes many database queries to resolve links, and an intolerable level of queries to retrieve even small networks. In comparison a more specific approach could use a single table for each type of structure (so for examples, annotations could be in one database table, and bookmarks in another). Resolving a structure then requires retrieving a single table row, which is much faster.
You might argue that the run-time overhead is worth it, because you can build a generalized back end, a hypertext engine that could deal with almost any type of structure. However this only really saves you effort when you have a generalized front end (user interface) as well.
This is a problem since at the User Interface level the generalized approach is not capable of delivering a quality experience. Users want a different type of interface when creating an annotation than when creating a bookmark, and they want the different types of structures displayed differently as well. In short the user interface layer needs to know the activity in order to render the structure (or the authoring process) appropriately. Using the raw OH structures in the UI is awkward and clumsy.
Since each new type of linking activity requires specific UI development, there is little advantage in the generalized back end. Modern development tools mean that is as easy to build a new specific back end as to map the new activity to an old generalized structure.
So perhaps Open Hypermedia failed because it fell awkwardly between these two layers. It still makes a lot of sense as a conceptual model, and as a point of interoperability, but inside the system itself, or in the user interface it seems overly complex and awkward.
In the end we implemented Synote as a series of specific structures. These were easy to code into the database, quick to manipulate at run time, and looked good when revealed in the user interface.
There's a lesson here for the Semantic Web, another grand idea from the Hypertext and Web community that I have commented on before. The Semantic Web is a set of standards for representing and exchanging knowledge (as sets of RDF triples constrained by ontologies), like Open Hypermedia it is therefore about models, openness and interoperability. But also like Open Hypermedia many Semantic Web developers have fallen into the trap of forcing their model down into the system implementation and up into the UI.
So in the end perhaps Open Hypermedia does offer us a valuable lesson - not about the structures of hypertext - but about the need to abstract implementation and user experience away from the conceptual models that drive them.
This is a hard lesson - because you want users and developers to see your models, otherwise how can you convince them of their value. But it needs to be learned, otherwise the resulting systems will be far from convincing, and the machine-readable Web will continue to exist only as a collection of chaotic mashups.
I became involved in Hypertext research in the last year of my undergraduate degree when I undertook a project on the first implementation of the Open Hypermedia Protocol (OHP). Open Hypermedia was a pre-web idea that arose in the early 1990's and at its heart was the idea that you should seperate content and structure. Many hypermedia systems at the time embedded links in content (as in fact the web does with the HREF tag), Open Hypermedia Systems broke with this, and managed a separate linkbase, combining it with the content at runtime.
The result was hypermedia that could work on multiple type of media (video and audio, document files, etc.), that could be managed (so no dead ends), versioned, and which could present different linksets according to the situation - so early personalization. There were many OH systems (Microcosm, Chimera, HOSS, DHM, and Callimachus to name a few) and some were pretty sophisticated. But they were all swept away by the relentless rise of the Web, a process of technic cleansing that led Mark Bernstein to lament the death of strange hypertexts by 2001.
The Open Hypermedia Protocol was a good idea in the spirit of Web standards, but it was also a plaster over a mortal wound. Proposed in 1996 the idea was to get a number of these OH systems to follow the Web model and interoperate through simple open standards. OHP and the range of fantastic systems still standing by the late 90s inspired me to write my PhD on different models of hypermedia, but by the time of my doctoral graduation in 2001 it was clear that the game was up and Open Hypermedia was swept away like everything else.
I've recently been involved in a project to create an online Multimedia Annotation system (Synote). Because Synote deals with Multimedia the system has to hold its links separately from its content, and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to return to some of those lost OH principles in the age of Web 2.0.
The Synote design team began a process to create a hypertext model to sit behind a YouTube style front end, at first OH seemed a perfect fit, and we designed a model that supported a variety of traditional OH link structures (typed, n-ary, bi-directional, multi-model links) that could be used for annotation, subtitling, bookmarking, and a host of other activities.
However, as the weeks wore on it became obvious that there were some serious problems with an OH design: the issue is that OH holds the link model as sacred. The model is pushed up into the User Interface, and down into the Database, but in reality it is not a comfortable fit in either.
At the Database level it introduces run-time complexity. The OH model is very flexible, but contains many internal references (as it is stuffed full of first class elements). As a result it takes many database queries to resolve links, and an intolerable level of queries to retrieve even small networks. In comparison a more specific approach could use a single table for each type of structure (so for examples, annotations could be in one database table, and bookmarks in another). Resolving a structure then requires retrieving a single table row, which is much faster.
You might argue that the run-time overhead is worth it, because you can build a generalized back end, a hypertext engine that could deal with almost any type of structure. However this only really saves you effort when you have a generalized front end (user interface) as well.
This is a problem since at the User Interface level the generalized approach is not capable of delivering a quality experience. Users want a different type of interface when creating an annotation than when creating a bookmark, and they want the different types of structures displayed differently as well. In short the user interface layer needs to know the activity in order to render the structure (or the authoring process) appropriately. Using the raw OH structures in the UI is awkward and clumsy.
Since each new type of linking activity requires specific UI development, there is little advantage in the generalized back end. Modern development tools mean that is as easy to build a new specific back end as to map the new activity to an old generalized structure.
So perhaps Open Hypermedia failed because it fell awkwardly between these two layers. It still makes a lot of sense as a conceptual model, and as a point of interoperability, but inside the system itself, or in the user interface it seems overly complex and awkward.
In the end we implemented Synote as a series of specific structures. These were easy to code into the database, quick to manipulate at run time, and looked good when revealed in the user interface.
There's a lesson here for the Semantic Web, another grand idea from the Hypertext and Web community that I have commented on before. The Semantic Web is a set of standards for representing and exchanging knowledge (as sets of RDF triples constrained by ontologies), like Open Hypermedia it is therefore about models, openness and interoperability. But also like Open Hypermedia many Semantic Web developers have fallen into the trap of forcing their model down into the system implementation and up into the UI.
So in the end perhaps Open Hypermedia does offer us a valuable lesson - not about the structures of hypertext - but about the need to abstract implementation and user experience away from the conceptual models that drive them.
This is a hard lesson - because you want users and developers to see your models, otherwise how can you convince them of their value. But it needs to be learned, otherwise the resulting systems will be far from convincing, and the machine-readable Web will continue to exist only as a collection of chaotic mashups.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
WikiSym 2008
I'm currently attending WikiSym 2008 in Porto, Portugal. WikiSym is a small conference with a mix of participants: wiki enthusiasts, developers, researchers, consultants, cynics and evengalists. It also has a very open freeform structure, helped along by the fantastic Portuguese sunshine (a weather event not seen in the UK since April 2007), and the welcoming city of Porto, which looks like an intricate sculpture that could fall down at any moment.
There are a number of trends here, many of them thought-provoking, including application wikis, spatial wikis, and social wikis. In some ways these remind me of the hypertext community in pre-web days, where people had a lot of fun with innovative systems (strange hypertexts as Mark Bernstein calls them) - the WikiSym community is repeating a lot of that work, but this time with real users, and without the impending sense of doom that was hanging over all other hypertext systems after 1994.
Two systems that look particularly promising are XWiki (a full blown wiki system for managing structured content) and ShyWiki (a research prototype for doing spatial hypertext in a wiki). In fact I feel quite inspired myself to write a strange wiki - keep an eye on this space.
One trend that worries me a bit is the glut of papers on Wikipedia and how it evolves and is used. In many ways this is all good stuff, and some of the results are interesting, but part of me is getting a bit bored with graphs of contributions and analyses of version histories that pretty much tell you what you would expect. And when somebody else does stand up with an analysis of a different system you can't help but secretly scoff at their quaint scope (only ten thousand users - how sad!).
Its been fun, quite a lot of fun actually, but I think its time to come up for air. I've only been here 3 days and already everything looks like a nail, and I want to hit it with my favorite wiki.
There are a number of trends here, many of them thought-provoking, including application wikis, spatial wikis, and social wikis. In some ways these remind me of the hypertext community in pre-web days, where people had a lot of fun with innovative systems (strange hypertexts as Mark Bernstein calls them) - the WikiSym community is repeating a lot of that work, but this time with real users, and without the impending sense of doom that was hanging over all other hypertext systems after 1994.
Two systems that look particularly promising are XWiki (a full blown wiki system for managing structured content) and ShyWiki (a research prototype for doing spatial hypertext in a wiki). In fact I feel quite inspired myself to write a strange wiki - keep an eye on this space.
One trend that worries me a bit is the glut of papers on Wikipedia and how it evolves and is used. In many ways this is all good stuff, and some of the results are interesting, but part of me is getting a bit bored with graphs of contributions and analyses of version histories that pretty much tell you what you would expect. And when somebody else does stand up with an analysis of a different system you can't help but secretly scoff at their quaint scope (only ten thousand users - how sad!).
Its been fun, quite a lot of fun actually, but I think its time to come up for air. I've only been here 3 days and already everything looks like a nail, and I want to hit it with my favorite wiki.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Starry Starry Second Life
Saw a great video pop up on Digg a little while ago, less Mac-based then the last one, and this time proving that there is a point to Second Life (even if its not quite the samauri sword filled metaverse that we might have hoped for).
This video by Robbie Dingo is based on The Starry Night by Van Gogh, and underlines that not everything in Second Life is real.
Or something :-/
This video by Robbie Dingo is based on The Starry Night by Van Gogh, and underlines that not everything in Second Life is real.
Or something :-/
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Duck Taped by Apple in California
Why is the brilliance of the new iPhone 3G so intangible? When I try and explain why I've replaced one 3G, GPS enabled, touch screen smart phone (a TyTN II) with another I get blank stares. When I show people how it works, they nod and smile as if to say that this is just what they expected - all perfectly normal.
So how come I feel like I've made such a technical leap forward - how come this simple device blows me away?
Last week I could browse the internet, I could watch videos, play games, listen to podcasts or my favorite albums, I could read my email and even make phone calls if I had to. Last week I could do all the things that I can do this week, but this week I have a smile on my face as I do them. Why?
That was me that was :-/
It's taken me a week of thinking about it to come up with an answer. I think its exactly because I had a similar device before that the iPhone seems so incredible. In 2003 I opted out of consumer mobile devices. I replaced my Nokia handset and aging Palm V with a PocketPC PDA (the HTC Magician) and have been using a variant of PocketPC ever since. I was always impressed by the technology crammed into them, but friends of mine weren't. They'd look at the clunky phone interface and compare it to their latest handsets, raise a disappointed eyebrow at the media player and point out their iPod, or shrug in apathy at the simple games that were available before picking up their PSP.
In short the PocketPC was a jack of all trades, but master of none. There was no way it could compare with the single function devices in the consumer electronics market. It was a generic computer doing its best.
And this is why the iPhone blows me away. Because its the first all-in-one device that genuinely competes with other consumer electronics. Its not a generic computer at all, its a single box with a phone interface as good as any handset, an mp3 player as good as an iPod, a games engine as good as a PSP (well - as good as a Nintendo DS anyway :-), organisers as good as a PDA, and its piece de la resistance - a web browser that's actually as good as a desktop client. Imagine 5 or 6 consumer gadgets all duck taped together and you're about there.
That's why when you show it to your friends they will shrug, whatever application you show them will be of the same standard that they are used to on their dedicated devices. And its also why some techies don't get it, because on paper the iPhone is no better than the devices that have come before - and in their eyes it might even be worse (after all it only runs on one hardware platform, doesn't allow you to multitask properly, and its all a bit too tightly controlled by Apple).
But after five cold and lonely years I have returned to the consumer electronics fold, and on reflection it's nice to be back.
The iPhone is a jack of some trades, but master of them all.
So how come I feel like I've made such a technical leap forward - how come this simple device blows me away?
Last week I could browse the internet, I could watch videos, play games, listen to podcasts or my favorite albums, I could read my email and even make phone calls if I had to. Last week I could do all the things that I can do this week, but this week I have a smile on my face as I do them. Why?
That was me that was :-/It's taken me a week of thinking about it to come up with an answer. I think its exactly because I had a similar device before that the iPhone seems so incredible. In 2003 I opted out of consumer mobile devices. I replaced my Nokia handset and aging Palm V with a PocketPC PDA (the HTC Magician) and have been using a variant of PocketPC ever since. I was always impressed by the technology crammed into them, but friends of mine weren't. They'd look at the clunky phone interface and compare it to their latest handsets, raise a disappointed eyebrow at the media player and point out their iPod, or shrug in apathy at the simple games that were available before picking up their PSP.
In short the PocketPC was a jack of all trades, but master of none. There was no way it could compare with the single function devices in the consumer electronics market. It was a generic computer doing its best.
And this is why the iPhone blows me away. Because its the first all-in-one device that genuinely competes with other consumer electronics. Its not a generic computer at all, its a single box with a phone interface as good as any handset, an mp3 player as good as an iPod, a games engine as good as a PSP (well - as good as a Nintendo DS anyway :-), organisers as good as a PDA, and its piece de la resistance - a web browser that's actually as good as a desktop client. Imagine 5 or 6 consumer gadgets all duck taped together and you're about there.
That's why when you show it to your friends they will shrug, whatever application you show them will be of the same standard that they are used to on their dedicated devices. And its also why some techies don't get it, because on paper the iPhone is no better than the devices that have come before - and in their eyes it might even be worse (after all it only runs on one hardware platform, doesn't allow you to multitask properly, and its all a bit too tightly controlled by Apple).
But after five cold and lonely years I have returned to the consumer electronics fold, and on reflection it's nice to be back.
The iPhone is a jack of some trades, but master of them all.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Open Ports for Open Minds
I'm at the JISC Innovation Forum this week. The Forum is a chance for people working for and funded by JISC to get together and discuss the big challenges in HE, FE and e-learning. The event is arranged around a number of discussion sessions, panels and forum (so its unlike a traditional conference as its not about individual work, but the lessons that we can learn as a community).
Yesterday we kicked off with a session about potential future directions for JISC, my suggestion was that JISC should concentrate on helping Universities manage the new wave of technology - not by promoting that they adopt it, but by encouraging them to simply move aside, and allow their students and staff some flexibility and freedom.
This has been exemplified by the WiFi network available to us at Keele University campus where the event is based. Each user requires an individual login and password, and is required to download a mysterious Java app that somehow negotiates access for you. Once connected you are restricted to http and https requests (no imap or vpn for example), and the java app frequently falls over and gets disconnected, requiring you to kill it (quit doesn't work) and then re-run it (although sometimes this results in you being denied access for a few moments, presumably while you wait for your MAC address to be cleared from some cache somewhere).
This is utter madness, a large neon sign that says "we have been required to offer you this service, but don't trust you and would rather you didn't use it". By making the experience so difficult they could put off a great deal of casual use, by locking the firewall down so tightly they force you use awkward web alternatives to the tools that you may be used to, and by requiring this bizarre java stage they ensure that only laptops (no phones or pdas) can access the network.
I've noticed a trend that students are beginning to abandon University e-learning infrastructure because it is too restrictive, and moving to public offsite facilities (such as Google Groups and Mail), but this is surely a good way of making students opt-out of the physical infrastructure too! If I was a student at Keele I would simply buy myself a mobile broadband connection and never use the local system.
JISC's greatest challenge is to get this sort of restrictive practice reversed, so that Universities can start to offer proper IT services to their students in such a way that experimentation and innovation can occur.
I can think of plenty of other examples. We have a colleague working at the University of Portsmouth who is blocked from accessing YouTube on his Uni network, making it impossible for him to access valuable teaching resources (he teaches languages and YouTube is a rich resource of material). At our own University (of Southampton) the central email systems have recently been overhauled, and the ability to set up email forwards to external accounts has been removed. Staff use the University email accounts as points of contact with students (its impossible to keep track of so many other accounts), and so this now forces students to maintain and check two accounts, rather than the one that they may have used for years.
Networks need to be managed, and damaging or illegal activity needs to be controlled or stopped - but the default policy should be to support openness.
Of course it's as much about open minds as open ports. We have to start respecting the autonomy of our staff and learners. By all means monitor the network and close down services or block ports that develop into a problem (as Napster did a few years ago), but give people the freedom to integrate their existing digital environment and personal gear as they see fit.
The alternative is to see them opt out altogether.
Yesterday we kicked off with a session about potential future directions for JISC, my suggestion was that JISC should concentrate on helping Universities manage the new wave of technology - not by promoting that they adopt it, but by encouraging them to simply move aside, and allow their students and staff some flexibility and freedom.
This has been exemplified by the WiFi network available to us at Keele University campus where the event is based. Each user requires an individual login and password, and is required to download a mysterious Java app that somehow negotiates access for you. Once connected you are restricted to http and https requests (no imap or vpn for example), and the java app frequently falls over and gets disconnected, requiring you to kill it (quit doesn't work) and then re-run it (although sometimes this results in you being denied access for a few moments, presumably while you wait for your MAC address to be cleared from some cache somewhere).
This is utter madness, a large neon sign that says "we have been required to offer you this service, but don't trust you and would rather you didn't use it". By making the experience so difficult they could put off a great deal of casual use, by locking the firewall down so tightly they force you use awkward web alternatives to the tools that you may be used to, and by requiring this bizarre java stage they ensure that only laptops (no phones or pdas) can access the network.
I've noticed a trend that students are beginning to abandon University e-learning infrastructure because it is too restrictive, and moving to public offsite facilities (such as Google Groups and Mail), but this is surely a good way of making students opt-out of the physical infrastructure too! If I was a student at Keele I would simply buy myself a mobile broadband connection and never use the local system.
JISC's greatest challenge is to get this sort of restrictive practice reversed, so that Universities can start to offer proper IT services to their students in such a way that experimentation and innovation can occur.
I can think of plenty of other examples. We have a colleague working at the University of Portsmouth who is blocked from accessing YouTube on his Uni network, making it impossible for him to access valuable teaching resources (he teaches languages and YouTube is a rich resource of material). At our own University (of Southampton) the central email systems have recently been overhauled, and the ability to set up email forwards to external accounts has been removed. Staff use the University email accounts as points of contact with students (its impossible to keep track of so many other accounts), and so this now forces students to maintain and check two accounts, rather than the one that they may have used for years.
Networks need to be managed, and damaging or illegal activity needs to be controlled or stopped - but the default policy should be to support openness.
Of course it's as much about open minds as open ports. We have to start respecting the autonomy of our staff and learners. By all means monitor the network and close down services or block ports that develop into a problem (as Napster did a few years ago), but give people the freedom to integrate their existing digital environment and personal gear as they see fit.
The alternative is to see them opt out altogether.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
ICALT 2008 - A Cottage Conference?
Last week I was at IEEE ICALT 2008, held in Santander,Spain. Last year's conference was a bit of a wakeup call for me, partly because of Mark Eisenstadt's wonderful keynote, and partly because of the realisation of just how quickly Web trends were making much of the presented work obsolete.
This year the community seems to have noticed the change of pace, and although no wonderful answers were presented, at least we heard some of the right questions being asked. The location was pretty fine as well - Santander is a well kept Spanish secret - although, as you can tell from this picture of us outside our hotel, we found the weather tough going (and yes, we really did send that many people :-)
(in fact, there a few people missing from that photo. There were 14 of us from LSL by the 2nd day)
There were some presentations of some neat e-learning tools too, including a tool from the people at the MiGen project for allowing students to construct simple algebraic problems using a graphical editor. It occurs to me that this is actually about teaching abstractions, and might be useful for first year CS and IT students, as well as schoolkids struggling with algebra :-)
My happier assessment of the conference may also have something to do with the fact that one of my PhD students, Asma Ounass, won the best paper award - a brilliant achievement given the size of the conference and the number of papers considered. Asma's paper was on using Semantic Web technology to create student groups, and is available on our School e-prints server.
Probably the most interesting session that I attended was a panel that tried to address the question of 'why technology innovations are still a cottage industry in education' (with Madhumita Bhattacharya, Dragan Gasevic, Jon Dron, Tzu-Chien Liu and Vivekananandan Suresh Kumar).
Some of the panelists took the opportunity to explain why their pet technology or approach was going to save e-learning, however I found Jon Dron's position statement the most compelling. Jon questioned the assumption behind the topic, and asked if having a cottage industry was so bad, and whether we really wanted to industrialise e-learning. The point behind his question is that Higher Education is itself a bit of a cottage industry; a craft with personalised products and highly skilled craftsmen. The danger is that if you wish for industrialised e-learning systems, you may end up with industrialised learning and teaching.
This set me wondering what cottage industries actually look like in a post-industrial society, and whether or not the tools we need for e-learning are similar to the technologies that they use. Thinking about it it seems that they apply mechanisation in the small - administrative tools like MS Office and communication tools like email, web sites, social networks and ebay.
That assessment might be just a result of my own prejudices about e-learning technology, but what the analogy does show is that there may be an assumption driving our e-learning systems: VLEs assume that the industrialisation of learning is a good thing (consistent quality and economies of scale), while PLEs assume that the industrialisation of learning is a bad thing (the ownership of production and inpersonalisation) and rally against it.
What is not yet clear is whether the cloud approach could scale in the same way as a traditional VLE, enabling institutions to support PLEs on a large scale, or whether the diverse set of people, preferences and tools would create unmanageable complexity. I know that this is a concern with our own systems staff, who have to maintain a large number of systems to ensure quality of service, and I've stated before that I feel that the institutional involvement is essential so there's no avoiding the problem by relying on 3rd party systems.
No answers - but at least we've starting asking the questions :-)
This year the community seems to have noticed the change of pace, and although no wonderful answers were presented, at least we heard some of the right questions being asked. The location was pretty fine as well - Santander is a well kept Spanish secret - although, as you can tell from this picture of us outside our hotel, we found the weather tough going (and yes, we really did send that many people :-)
(in fact, there a few people missing from that photo. There were 14 of us from LSL by the 2nd day)
There were some presentations of some neat e-learning tools too, including a tool from the people at the MiGen project for allowing students to construct simple algebraic problems using a graphical editor. It occurs to me that this is actually about teaching abstractions, and might be useful for first year CS and IT students, as well as schoolkids struggling with algebra :-)
My happier assessment of the conference may also have something to do with the fact that one of my PhD students, Asma Ounass, won the best paper award - a brilliant achievement given the size of the conference and the number of papers considered. Asma's paper was on using Semantic Web technology to create student groups, and is available on our School e-prints server.
Probably the most interesting session that I attended was a panel that tried to address the question of 'why technology innovations are still a cottage industry in education' (with Madhumita Bhattacharya, Dragan Gasevic, Jon Dron, Tzu-Chien Liu and Vivekananandan Suresh Kumar).
Some of the panelists took the opportunity to explain why their pet technology or approach was going to save e-learning, however I found Jon Dron's position statement the most compelling. Jon questioned the assumption behind the topic, and asked if having a cottage industry was so bad, and whether we really wanted to industrialise e-learning. The point behind his question is that Higher Education is itself a bit of a cottage industry; a craft with personalised products and highly skilled craftsmen. The danger is that if you wish for industrialised e-learning systems, you may end up with industrialised learning and teaching.
This set me wondering what cottage industries actually look like in a post-industrial society, and whether or not the tools we need for e-learning are similar to the technologies that they use. Thinking about it it seems that they apply mechanisation in the small - administrative tools like MS Office and communication tools like email, web sites, social networks and ebay.
That assessment might be just a result of my own prejudices about e-learning technology, but what the analogy does show is that there may be an assumption driving our e-learning systems: VLEs assume that the industrialisation of learning is a good thing (consistent quality and economies of scale), while PLEs assume that the industrialisation of learning is a bad thing (the ownership of production and inpersonalisation) and rally against it.
What is not yet clear is whether the cloud approach could scale in the same way as a traditional VLE, enabling institutions to support PLEs on a large scale, or whether the diverse set of people, preferences and tools would create unmanageable complexity. I know that this is a concern with our own systems staff, who have to maintain a large number of systems to ensure quality of service, and I've stated before that I feel that the institutional involvement is essential so there's no avoiding the problem by relying on 3rd party systems.
No answers - but at least we've starting asking the questions :-)
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