Switching to Mac

Right - that's it. I've had enough. It's time to say goodbye.

I'm fed up of hourglasses, crappy modal dialog boxes, ugly UI and an OS that reboots itself without bothering to ask first. After 15 years of suffering its time to move on. I've decided to buy a Mac.




Don't get me wrong, while there's a lot wrong with Windows, there's also quite a lot of things that are right. Its much more stable and secure than it's generally given credit for, and it's popularity gives it a steam roller advantage when it comes to choice of applications and the level of third party support. However, its time for me to upgrade my laptop, and I have a simple choice to make - do I change to Vista, or do I change to Mac OS.

By a slim margin the Mac wins. There are a number of reasons:

• The Macbook Pro is the best designed heavyweight notebook. The 17" model is as light as my current 15" Samsung X60, and is even a bit thinner.
• I'm no longer worried about leaving applications behind. I can get Office for the Mac, and virtually everything else I use is an internet application (Google Maps, Wikipedia, Digg, Blogger, etc.). Microsoft beware - internet apps may not compete with your applications directly (well, not much), but they remove a huge incentive to stay with windows. You can now move and still stick with what you know.
• I'm ready for a different set of quibbles. I'm not expecting the Mac to be perfect, but at least it will be irritating in a different kind of way. I'm red raw with Windows, and want to scratch somewhere else :-/
• The unknown Vista. Windows Vista looks pretty, but probably sucks. I know that's not a scientific appraisal, but if I'm going to spend the effort learning the ins and out of a new OS, I might as well change to Mac OS now.
• The Boot camp safety net. As a fallback I think that the Macbook Pro running Vista might actually be the best Windows notebook, so in the worse case scenario I can just switch to that.
  
• A wave of techie defections. This is really obvious to me because I work in a Computer Science research lab and do a circuit of computer-oriented conferences, but may be a bit invisible to those working in less geek-centic circles. The fact is that the Mac is gaining a big geek market share. The popular share is thought to be around 7%, but I would say that it is at least triple that with technical folk, maybe higher. There is a mass defection - which seems a weird trend, as technical folk typically shun out-of-the-box solutions, and software that is perceived as being noddy, but it seems like Mac OS has avoided this by being solid and flexible. One of my worries over the years was that the Mac was a simple computer for simple users - but the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary. If it's good enough for them, its good enough for me.

The Macbooks have just received a bump, and although the high end Sony Vaios are better on paper, I suspect that it might be another case of monkeys driving Ferraris.

The time is right and my first Mac is on order. I promise not to buy any black polo necks, or to get obsessive about white peripherals.

Let's see how I get on...

Nativism vs. Literacy

I have read a number of pieces recently attacking the notion of the Digital Native - Prensky's notion that there is a new generation of students who are in some way soaked in technology to the extent that it has changed their behaviour.

Stephen Marshall suggests that the concept of the Digital Native is reaching its autumnal years, and that there has been too much hype around this notion, and not enough evidence.

A recent study commissioned by JISC does a great job of analysing the characteristics that Prensky suggested (such as the ability to multi-task, and a preference for fun-style learning). The study concludes that while some aspects of the Digital Native idea do seem to hold true others are less clear. In summary:

True:

• Competent with Technology


• High Expectations of ICT


• Prefer Interactive Systems


• Prefer visual info over text


• Have a tendency to cut'n'paste


• They believe intellectual property laws to be unfair (but do understand them)

Open:

• Prefer Digital communication to Physical communication


• Are natural multi-taskers


• Want entertainment and fun in their learning


• They expect to find everything on the Web, and for free

False:

• Have no patience for delay (want instant everything)


• Prefer peers to authority figures


• Learn by trial and error


• Are expert searchers

The report also makes the point that some attributes seem to be universally true across all age groups and reflect general changes in society:

• Want/expect to be connected all the time


• Prefer small chunks rather than long texts

(this is greatly simplifying the report - its well worth reading the summary)

This fits in with a recent presentation that I saw by Emma Place at the recent LLAS e-learning conference. Emma noted that while there seemed to be an increased familiarity with technology, their was not a corresponding increase in the wisdom of how to apply it. For example, that students did not understand issues of evidential quality or provenance, and that this resulted in a cut'n'paste culture - information foraging that encourages shallow learning and borders on plagiarism.

In my own post advocating a new approach to e-learning tools I picked out the notion of Web Literacy from the general idea of Digital Natives. I suggested that Web Literacy was more than the ability to use the Web (that's more like Plain Old Computer Literacy), but was instead a desire to create an on-line identity, a willingness to forgo some aspects of privacy, and to embrace online relationships as the equal of real ones.

I like the notion of Web Literacy, as it explains a new attitude within the new generation, without making assumptions that the literacy is universal, or completely positive. The phrase Digital Natives seems too broad a brush, discussing literacies means we can talk separately about other factors, such as Computer Literacy and Information Literacy (which Emma might suggest is in danger of decline!), and also talk of the problems of illiteracy.

A colleague of mine, Mike Wald, has made the point that Literacy is a loaded term - that it has positive connotations, and sounds like something that we should aspire to - and perhaps he's right. Maybe Web Literacy is better used to describe some future form of this current behaviour where issues such as loss of privacy and respect for copyright have been untangled and hammered into some more respectable form - but then again, who gets to say what is respectable. Maybe these ideas should change?

Whatever terms we use I am confident that when designing the next generation of e-learning tools we should be aware that we are no longer creating applications in a virgin space, but are instead trying to build tools that fit into a person's existing digital landscape. We have to work with existing identities, interoperate with familiar toolsets, and provide an experience which matches a student's adventures on the wider Web.

And that sounds pretty positive to me.

It should make us WinCE

I can't bear it any longer. I can feel the rage building as I push forward through the crowd, people jostle and I duck a stray elbow. I catch a glimpse of him through the pressing bodies. I can't believe no-one else has noticed.

Most people seem enraptured, but some seem distracted. One man steps aside clutching a copy of Macworld, confusion in his eyes. Another holds up a Nokia, caressing the buttons in amazement. Perhaps the spell is breaking.

I step out of the crowd into the path of the procession and point an accusing finger at the audacious pink monstrosity atop the imperial coach. Microsoft PocketPC stares back in disdain as I finally voice what we must surely all be thinking.

"He's got no clothes on!"

A murmur passes through the people; eyes blink, the mists begin to clear. They have put up with the lie for so long. A woman falls to her knees, and a PDA Phone drops from her fingers. It lies on the cobbles revealing a badly rendered web page, the shame of the woman's browsing experience plain for all to see. An older man stabs defiantly at his new HTC Touch, only to cry out in despair as the attractive HTC software fades away to be replace by ugly grey scroll bars and an illsuited Start Menu.

There are many people here, yet the crowd is not as big as it might be. Many people have failed to turn up because their diaries haven't synched properly. Others tried to arrange to meet friends, but were let down by badly designed Contacts and GPS integration. Even cut and paste is not standard across applications.

The truth becomes clear - this operating system, this archaic throwback, this black sheep - it is a total shambles.

The crowd grows ugly. A rumour is started (although it's tied to one network and is appallingly expensive over a 18-month tie-in period), there is a new boy in town, someone with a iSuit tailored for his form-factor. The copy of Macworld is raised in defiance.

Excited whispers pass from ear to ear. There is more news. Google is coming.

PocketPC falls from the coach, naked and ashamed. How could we have lived in darkness so long, how could we not have realised. We bought Ferraris driven by monkeys, and wondered why they crashed so often.

The crowd is now a mob, PocketPC is as good as dead even before he hits the ground. Yet I feel uneasy as the mob closes in. We can't blame the capitalists, we can't blame the ordinary phone users, and we can't blame Symbian (after all Psion and Palm have been trying to tell us for years).

This was our fault. We bought the thing.

Shame on us.

Does Portillo dream of electric pigs?

Mmmm... so the other night I caught a BBC Horizon programme hosted by Michel Portillo called 'How to Kill a Human Being'. The point of the programme was to look into the various methods of execution used around the world - but particularly in the United States - to see which was the most humane, and potentially to propose a better method.

I have to say that since seeing the mighty Portillo fall to the puny Twig in the 1997 election (known in our lefty student house as 'bloody good telly'), I have found a grudging respect for the former defence secretary. Like many pariah politicians, his fall from grace seemed to release him from invisible chains, and he has been reborn as a rather thoughtful political commentator with just the right dash of gravitas.

However there were some uncomfortable glimpses of the old Portillo as he traipsed around a variety of unfortunate labs, hanging crash dummies and electrocuting pig corpses while musing on our responsibilities to the condemned.

You may have guessed that I'm against the death penalty, not from any particular moral high ground, but simply because I do not accept that the state has the right to take the lives of its own citizens - this seems somehow to be against the spirit of the agreement that exists between free people and the governments that consensually rule them.

Thankfully the EU agrees with me, and unlike my otherwise freedom-loving American friends I sleep soundly knowing that my country does not have the right to murder me under a cloak of due process.

All of this means that the notion of humane execution seems rather odd to me. Perhaps in the future the Horizon team could address other pressing questions from the oxymoronic fringe.

• How do you have the least disruptive riot?
• How does one politely kidnap?
• What's the most generous way to burgle?

Happily the programme ended in a puff of self-indignation when Portillo presented his own version of the perfect execution method (hypoxia) to some Professor or Evil in the United States (sorry - I didn't make a note of the chap's name, just in case writing it down would summon him like some horrific angle of death).

Professor Evil looked amazed at Portillo's suggestion of humane execution, because he wanted the condemned to suffer; he was after an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a barbarous murder for a capital offence in any one of 38 states.

It was a satisfying reality check to end a programme that was just a little bit too gleeful about killing - even if the killing was all done in the best possible taste.

There is no Guitar

Great article over at Gamers with Jobs about a near religious experience with Guitar Hero 3. I've not played Guitar Hero, but I can certainly relate to that moment in-the-zone when your senses extend beyond your body, and for a brief few moments you are one with the world.

The guys at Slashdot don't seem convinced by the whole religious experience angle, but I'm not so sure. There's something rather pure and beautiful about those times when the world fades away; something that even a cheap plastic guitar can't spoil.

At this festive time, when the media is full of Coca-Cola Santa Clauses, predictable Xmas Number Ones, and Witless Elf Movies, its actually quite nice to see something more deep and meaningful - even if it is in the aisles of Best Buy.

So here's to all those moments of Guitar Hero calm in a bad and crazy world...

The Descent (from above)

Earlier this week I managed to watch The Descent, a British horror flick that I missed on its cinema, rental, DVD, and satellite spiral. Luckily the nice folks at Channel 4 marched it into the last broadcast saloon known as terrestrial telly and I finally caught up with it. Unfortunately they failed to warn me that it is the scariest movie ever made :-(

Essentially the story is that there is a group of intelligent, peaceful cave dwellers living under the Appalachian mountains, every so often they venture above ground and hunt for food, but otherwise keep themselves to themselves. Then one day a bunch of psychotic killers drops into their midst, all of a sudden the cave dwellers find themselves fighting for their lives as the deranged invaders storm every last corner of their home, smashing in dwellers heads with rocks, drowning them and being positively vicious with a pick axe.

The dwellers fight back, but because they are blind they have no real chance against the stronger, more intelligent predators that are slowly wiping them out. The invaders even get a bit bored and start murdering each other at several points in the story. The film ends with the brave dwellers taking out the invaders main soldier (at a huge cost if the screaming and splatters are anything to go by), while the invader's leader sinks completely into madness.

The weird thing is that the film makers decided to tell the story from the point of view of the psychotic invaders (who of course are humans, in fact a party of women going caving), almost ignoring the noble family lives of the dwellers (who of course are presented as hideous monsters).

I just don't buy this telling. It seems obvious to me that it is the women who are the most terrifying monsters, take the score at the end of the film:

• Humans 10
• Monsters 3

and that's with the monsters having the advantage of being on their home turf. Let's face it, as soon as the word gets out that the mountain's full of pasty-looking monkey-men they're stuffed (probably in the 'and mounted' sense of the word).

It's not the first time that I've noticed this weird twisting of the tale. Take the film Aliens (the second one with James Cameron at the helm). Its true that at the beginning of the film around 300 people get turned into human Cow&Gate paste for the Alien nursery (shame it wasn't those Spartans - that would have shown them!), but look what happens when we later inject a measly 13 soldiers into an otherwise peaceful alien colony. Thousands of aliens get wiped out in all manor of gun-porn ways, and then at the end, as if to add insult to injury the person who isn't a soldier goes all fancy dress in a JCB costume and tears great lumps out of the alien queen. But wait - there's more. Not intent with this carnage they proceed to nuke the remaining confused aliens from orbit.

• Humans: pretty much everything
• Aliens: 313

So the moral is that if you're at a party and notice a corner of wan-looking slimy cave dwellers, another of slick-headed Giger aliens with acid for blood, and a third of ditsy young women in day-glo jackets, go and sit with the monsters - you're statistically less likely to get your head bashed in.

JISC CETIS Conference 2007

This week I went to the JISC CETIS Conference in Aston as a panelist in the Semantic Structures for e-Learning session. After my bleak interaction with the e-learning community back in ICALT, I was pleasantly surprised to find a really progressive mood.

In particular Mark Stiles gave a characteristically candid closing keynote that was uncannily like my own talk on Web Literacy a few weeks ago. Mark came at the problem from a policy angle (rather than a technology one), and asked the question of whether VLEs were the new orthodoxy, constraining and limiting student learning rather than promoting it. He lamented the control and manage culture in HE, and pointed out that students were breaking free of controlled institutional e-learning systems and beginning to use public applications and sites (to which they occasionally invite a lecturer - but only if they like them!).

There is definitely something in the air...

The Semantic Structures panel was a similar pleasant surprise. I came prepared with what I thought was a fairly outlandish position - that the Semantic Web was already happening in the real world, and that we needed to stop speculating about applications in a far semantic future and start worrying about how semantic applications might have an impact now.

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For me this raises a number of key questions about how we articulate the advantages of RDF and OWL over XML and XSD for Web 2.0 style mashups - after all they both enable encourage well-formed metadata and interoperability, so why use RDF?

I was therefore surprised to find myself emerging as the hardest Semantic Web person on the panel (at Southampton this is rarely a position I find myself in!), so perhaps my main point was lost somewhat. I invoked the characters from the Wizard of Oz as examples of people who get so wrapped up in the journey they don't realise what they already have - my point was that in some ways the Semantic Web community is like that, so concerned with the technological upper levels of the layer cake that they miss the significance of the emerging data web that is already out there.

The other panelists gave very interesting position statements which introduced me to a number of new things, including Cohere, GRDDL and RDFa. The audience also raised some interesting questions, but mostly they boiled down to the same one that I had raised. Why use RDF when XML gives you so much for so little effort? Alistair Miles described this as a variant of the Tragedy of the Commons - in that RDF only shows real advantage when there are already many people publishing it, and the conclusion of the session was that to push this work forward in our world we should all becoming semantic extroverts - hoping to achieve some sort of viral effect.

I had the chance to run this past Wendy Hall yesterday. Wendy was head of group when I was studying for a PhD in Hypertext, and is now a co-founder with Tim Berners-Lee of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) based at MIT and Southampton. Wendy was pretty robust in her defence of the Semantic Web as a means to interoperability, and pointed out the semantic standard's advantages over POX (that RDF/OWL is more shareable, more flexible, and encourages general rather than bespoke solutions). I think that the advantages at the top end of the Semantic Stack (i.e. the ability to automatically exchange ontologies and the functionality that this unlocks) is rather secondary to Wendy - a bonus if you like - and that the main goal is still to create a machine readable web using the best language that we can (and in most terms that is RDF/OWL).

Her approach is 'Build It and They Will Come' - which takes us back to Mark Stile's keynote. Mark mentioned this as one of many strategies to encourage students to use e-learning systems. Actually he followed this with a 'But Of Course They Wont' based on some of his past experiences. Mark encouraged us to think about how we can engage with students without trying to control what they are doing, and I wonder if that's not the best message for the semantic web as well: to engage with Web users, find the best ways in which to help them express and exchange their data, and introduce the Semantic Web quietly, as and when the real needs arise.