In Defence of the Academy

Given that we are no longer to spend public money on higher education the new deal for students is progressive and better than their current financial arrangements - but goodness that misses the point! The thing that we all seem to have forgotten is that there is no given and that the privatisation of higher education is not the only way forward. I've seen to much energy over the last few weeks spent debating the deal, and not enough considering the principle. I think we have forgotten something as a country - the Academy needs defending.

It starts with money. Education should not be about money, but one of the loudest arguments about moving from public to personal financing of education is that graduates earn more money because of their degrees and should therefore pay for them.

But this is not true - it may seem odd, but this is a case of mistaken cause and effect. Let us imagine a company that took the top performing 40% of its workforce and gave them a special training day. Then imagine that the company turned around and said that the employees needed to pay for the day, because they were the ones earning the most money. That's what we're doing to students. Putting the top 40% of school performers through the HE system and then making them pay for being the top 40% earners on the other side. Many of these students would have earned equally impressive salaries working their way up through a company, and in fact some of them may have taken a financial hit from taking their degree (for example, would be small business owners who become nurses).

Of course a degree confers advantages, and for some people that will mean more money, but this is not universally true. A degree may open up a specialist career, it may be personally fulfilling, it may even make you a better person - but it will not necessarily make you money (especially when considered over a lifetime of earning - three of four years of zero income is a lot to overcome).

Even if it does, even if - as a direct result of your education - you earn more money than you would have without it, the government gets it back through taxing that increased earnings. There simply is not a financial case to be made.

But hang on - if a degree is not linked to earnings - then why are we told that its so important that people go to University and get a degree, what about this whole 'knowledge economy' thing?

Well Higher Education is linked to wealth, just not at the personal level. The whole society benefits from HE, your degree doesn't make you money, it makes the country money. Stepping back from the individual you can see that having highly educated people in society creates new opportunities - it builds whole new sectors. While an individual may become a big fish without their own degree, a HE system creates the seas in which they can swim. I am not a mechanical engineer but I benefit from the tax paid by large engineering firms such as Rolls Royce and BAE Systems, and the value to the country extends beyond taxation - I didn't study medicine but I have benefited on countless occasions from others who have, I am not a lawyer, but law graduates have helped create a stable system in which I can live.

On balance when you get a degree it is the country that benefits financially rather than you.

A society that has abandoned Higher Education has abandoned any aspirations of real value.

But I started by saying that education should not be about money. Steven Schwartz - writing in the THE - makes a nice point about the tension in HE between short term and long term goals (training for a job vs. an education for life). Training is all about setting yourself up for a career but education is something else, education is about enriching life (your own and others) through awareness and understanding. To think that education is an end goal is hubris, it is a process, and the Academy is a community of learners. That is why research and teaching go so naturally together - the Professors are learning too.

A strong Academy adds vibrancy and momentum to our society as well as our economy. It brings richness to all areas of public life and reminds us that as a civilisation we are still learning together. It gives us public ownership of knowledge and ideas, and provides intellectual analysis that holds the powerful to account. At best the Academy is not only a cornerstone of society, but it is a key way to improve that society and to expand it's horizons. A society that has abandoned Higher Education has abandoned any aspirations of real value.

Britain is very lucky to have a world class Higher Education System. We are second only to the US, a country five times our size, in the number of our Universities in the world top 200. Our HE system adds incalculable value to our country and our culture.

So as we continue to debate the rights and wrongs of tuition fees, graduation taxes and student dissent, let us bear in mind that while in the short term it may be money that excites, frightens or motivates us, in the longer term our happiness and security as a country depend on deeper and more meaningful qualities.

I am deeply disappointed with those representatives that voted to privatise education under cover of cost cutting, with no real mandate from the people, and no proper discussion of the consequences.

Shame on you. You have made our country a poorer place.

Rise of the Other Web

Isn't the Web great? Isn't it crazy and anarchic, vibrant and wild, unpredictable, awesome and thoroughly marvelous? Well it has been, but there is no guarantee that it will stay that way.

I've been working with and researching Hypertext for nearly fifteen years. The Hypertext systems that I studied for my PhD were alternative contemporaries of the early Web - based on a desktop model and inter-operating applications. But since that time we've seen the Web take Hypertext away from the desktop and make it global. The Web we have built is democratic and open; anyone can publish, and most importantly anyone can link. For profit, for criticism, for fun, for ill, the technologies of the Web do not judge or distinguish.

there is a new trend that threatens the democratic and egalitarian nature of the Web...

For a while there we all went a bit Web loopy, remember Microsoft's incredible about turn when they discovered the Internet and tried to turn your desktop into a Web browser? And of course there is the current crop of Web Applications, point your browser at docs.google.com and it turns into a collaborative text editor.

But there is a new trend that threatens the democratic and egalitarian nature of the Web. It plays to consumerism and relies on technical naivety. It is the App Store.

I must concede that the Apple App Store is brilliantly executed. Apple weren't the first to think of making a library of downloadable components but they were the first to make it truly usable and in the process defined a whole new vocabulary for everyday users. 'There's an App for That' is now a part of popular culture and I admire it enough that we are borrowing the whole meme for some of our own systems.

So Apps are great for extending the functionality of a device but the worrying trend is for information providers to use mobile Apps to encircle information and provide it to you neatly packaged, but crucially outside of the Web and all its egalitarian mechanisms. This trend is set to continue as providers realise that Apps include a handy micro-payments system that means they can charge for content again. You can almost hear the sound of old business models being wheeled out and firing up their antiquated boilers.

To some extend this is positive, after all professional journalists and artists are all part of a healthy society, and we need to find ways of supporting their work. But I worry that the commercial pressure to do this will create a generation of isolated tools that take but do not give back. The App model has been so commercially successful that Apple is threatening to roll it out to their MacOS platform, and what Apple does today, Microsoft will do in five years time, and if that happens this kind of control could well become the norm across all of our computing devices.

We should be very nervous about the impact of all of this on the Web. In the nineties it was the digital home of geekdom, but its got a lot more interesting since everyone else joined the party. It would be a shame to go back.

Tim Berners-Lee highlights this problem in his latest Scientific American article (amongst other concerns with Net Neutrality and Openness):

"Other companies are also creating closed worlds. The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone “apps” rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it. ... But as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, “walled gardens,” no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates."

His point is that the 'Other' Web created by the App model is not a Web at all. Just the opposite - it is isolated, singular, and barren in comparison. Cartoonist Hugh Macleod makes the same point more bluntly:

The challenge for computer scientists (or should that be Web Scientists) is to work out how to work the benefits of the App Store into the open web, thus protecting it from the closed model. This should probably include the quality of the user experience (HTML5 may address some of this) and the need for an efficient micro-payment model has never been so pressing. 

But perhaps we should also challenge some of our assumptions - for example, the web browser may not be the only portal onto the wonderful web world, there may be a place for more specific applications that play nicely and use Web standards in a broader web ecology, downloadable Apps that are URI addressable, and which switch you seamlessly from one App to another.

Come to think of it,  that sounds a lot like good old fashioned Open Hypermedia - perhaps History will be kinder than we all expected :-)

IPhone 4. Slightly Better. Again.

About a fortnight ago I managed to wrestle a shiny new iPhone 4 out of the University. It's a long and frankly uninteresting story full of needless hoop jumping and energy-sapping effort. Suffice to say that I fought hard for this little device.

Two years ago I wrote about why the iPhone 3G was so enormously important. This was a device that wasn't just great to own and use, it redefined the standards for a smart phone, and laughed hysterically at the embarrassed naked emperors of the day. Apple was quite right to proclaim that it changed everything. It did.

And now here we are with a shiny new device. So does it change everything again?

Well no. But let's be honest, the opportunity has passed, in 2007 PDA phones were terribly neglected pieces of junk that only a nerd would love. In 2010 the world is awash with smart looking devices. Changing the game means bringing in new players, and Apple is no longer head and shoulders above the crowd.

But this is still an incredible phone, and in my view - if you set aside the selling of one's soul to Apple - the best device of its kind.

It's more responsive, faster and multi-tasking means app switching is almost instant; the camera is now good enough to replace your everyday automatic, and the HD video means that you can ebay that Flip. Best of all the screen is a thing of consummate beauty - a seriously lovely display that is bright, detailed and vivid. For an old 3G user those differences are definitely worth the upgrade.



However, you may have seen this brilliant video about the iPhone vs. the HTC EVO (NSFW). It's funny, but utterly misses the point. The reason the iPhone is the best phone is that it has the best designed user experience, and at the end of the day it doesn't matter if other phones have bigger screens or better cameras, it doesn't matter whether more things are possible, what matters is that it does what it does fantastically well. My advice for those other manufacturers is step away from the feature list, put down the soldering iron and the bag of bits, and take a long hard look at how nice your device is to actually live with.

This is what Apple realised with the iPhone, and it's why this Devil Phone is still my favourite device. Quite simply, it makes you smile.

Choosing our Science: Hypertext and Web Science

This blog post is an abridged version of a guest editorial I co-wrote for the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Special Issue on Web Science. The full editorial can be found in EPrints.

Hypertext and the Web

What is Hypertext? It is well known in our community that the word Hypertext was coined by Nelson in 1965 to describe his vision of an intertwingled world of transcluded electronic texts, but we also know that the ideas and principles of Hypertext predate electronic computers. Writers and scholars have always experimented with interlinked texts, from the Talmud and the Synoptic Gospels to Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths. Well’s World Brain, Otlet’s Mundaneum and Bush’s memex set out grand visions for global stores of human knowledge based on index cards and microfiche.

The Hypertext Pioneers (Bush, Engelbart and Nelson)

Despite these broad origins Hypertext has come to be seen almost exclusively from a digital viewpoint, perhaps because of its many synergies with key concepts from informatics and computer science, such as networks, communication theory, and knowledge modeling. But Hypertext is more than digital. It predates computers and predates computer science. Any broad approach to hypertext must therefore be interdisciplinary, even if keeping one foot in the digital domain.

The Web is the closest that we have come to the grand visions of the hypertext pioneers. From unpromising beginnings as a basic read-only distributed hypertext, the Web has evolved over the last twenty years into the premier distributed application platform. As a platform it supports a whole ecology of hypertext tools and forms: versioned collaborative hypertexts (Wikis), bookmarks and trails (Delicious or Digg), citizen journalism (blogs and sharing sites) and social conversation and chatter (Facebook or Twitter). As a hypertext it disappointed and confounded us, but as a platform it has excited and renewed hypertext research.

A Science of the Web

Web Science is a new discipline that is concerned with the study of the Web and our behavior on it. Web Science draws on a wide range of traditional disciplines (such as sociology, economics and law) to understand, model and predict the Web’s impact on our lives and societies. Through Web Science the hope is that we can better understand the affects of different technology, and the changing attitudes and social norms that emerge from its use. The aim is to better guide new developments in both technology and policy.


Web Science was first proposed by Tim Berners-Lee et al in an article for Science (in 2006), this then led to the establishment of the Web Science Research Initiative (now the Web Science Trust ) an agreement between MIT in the US, and the University of Southampton in the UK, to explore and promote the study of the Web; in particular by developing curricula for Web Science and through establishing the Web Science conference (held for the second time this year in Raleigh, North Carolina).

As the Web has become an essential service in our society, so hypertext has become an essential tool of communication and interaction. If we accept that the Web is an ecology of hypertexts and that Web Science is the interdisciplinary study of the Web then we should expect that Web Science and Hypertext are natural bedfellows. It was this thought that led us to ask what is or should be the relationship between Hypertext research and Web Science.

In 2008 we ran a workshop at ACM Hypertext 2008 on ‘Web Science: Collaboration and Collective Intelligence’. In part we were interested in what aspects of its Hypertext work that the community also considered as Web Science. The workshop was the largest at the conference, and ten position papers were presented on the day on topics ranging from trust and media bias to narrative structure.

There was a great deal of interest from participants about the idea of Web Science, but there was also uncertainty. Computer Science is itself a hybrid discipline – engineering, mathematics, logic, human factors, semiotics and semantics, etc. Where were the boundaries of this new discipline of Web Science, were new tools based on interdisciplinary theories part of it, and at what point was it appropriate to call ourselves Web Scientists?

Are We Web Scientists?

The papers in the Special Issue concerned with Web Science in-the-small, the personal relationships that we have with information and knowledge, are on topics that are historically familiar to Hypertext research: meta-data, knowledge interfaces and narrative. Hypertext researchers should feel very comfortable exploring these issues and perhaps the emergence of Web Science is partly a reflection of our willingness to explore new interdisciplinary areas that draw on a wider range of the humanities in order to understand the relationships between users and hypertext systems.

The huge success of the Web has meant that it is possible to do Web Science in-the-large, and we also present a number of papers that study the impact of Web systems on professional and personal communities, and analyze the social structures that result. These are new areas of possibility for Hypertext researchers and represent an opportunity for new longitudinal studies and the use of statistical research methodologies.

Hypertext research is naturally growing and evolving to reflect the pervasiveness of the Web and to take advantage of a changing interdisciplinary scientific culture. These changes take it closer to Web Science, and there are many overlapping areas where Hypertext is a valuable lens with which to examine the impact of the Web. However, Hypertext remains its own subject, with its own long intellectual and scholarly history.

In the end it is our choice as researchers as to whether we choose to name what we do as a Science of the Web, or ultimately brand ourselves as Web Scientists. In making that choice we should remember that Web Science is more than rebadging existing work. Interdisciplinary research can be difficult to communicate, and by using a strong term like Web Science we create a clear space for interdisciplinary research approaches, one that encourages us to explore in new ways and to think more holistically about our subject.

Hanged

A weird night for UK politics. The people have spoken, and they said "Erm..."

Not only have we ended up with a hung parliament, but it is so precariously balanced that no obvious power bloc has enough votes to stake a convincing claim to government (BBC estimates 320 vs 315 seats, with 326 needed for a genuine majority). The only obvious outcome this morning is that we will all be doing this again rather soon.


Perhaps the biggest irony is that the party standing for the most significant electoral reform, the Liberal Democrats, had a night that was just as disappointing as anyone else. They advocated Proportional Representation, a system that causes the numbers of seats won to more fairly reflect the popular vote, statistically this would mean that hung parliaments were more likely, and would transform the landscape of British politics as coalition governments would become the norm, rather than the exception. So in a way the LibDem failure means that while the British people have voted for a hung parliament, they have simultaneously soundly rejected the idea of hung parliaments. We are a fickle lot.

The Internets is still resonating with calls for political reform, but with these figures all we may get is a minority government limping on with no clear sense of what the reform will look like (and no, David Cameron, merely reducing the number of MPs and redrawing boundaries to favour the Conservatives doesn't count). Half-hearted attempts to plaster over the problems will not help.

What we need is a properly considered proposal for joint reform of both houses of parliament. For example, coupling First Past the Post (or a variant like the Alternative Vote)* for House of Commons members (tending to deliver strong majority governments), with list-based proportional representation in the House of Lords (reflecting the popular vote, and allowing parties to effectively select key lords members - such as ex-prime-ministers and experienced diplomats - while retaining democratic legitimacy).

If anything is clear today it is that reforming one without the other would be foolish. We have two houses in our democratic system, each with a separate role to play in the government of our country, for once let's use them together to give us fair but effective representation.

(* oops - in the first version of this post I listed STV here, which would probably have the opposite effect. I've corrected it now to say FPTP and AV.) 

Knowledge Ergonomics (That Thing We Do)

For the last few years I've been involved in research and development projects where the goal has been to design, build and evaluate useful and useable knowledge and information interfaces. But I've always had a problem articulating this as a research challenge. It's related to Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but isn't so much concerned with surface details or visual interfaces, but seems an inherently deeper problem - how does the system match with working patterns, are the information models at the right level for users, is the workflow aligned with what they do?

For example, when designing mobile tools for placement learners the MPLAT Project ran into the well known problem of co-design. The technologists don't understand the domain well-enough to design an appropriate fit, but the domain-experts don't understand the technology well-enough to be truly innovative. I once heard this described as the Problem of the Robot Horse, a fictional scenario where scientists from the 1700's are asked what vehicle they would build with modern technology, and all they can think of are robot horses - because a horse is all that they are familiar with.
In MPLAT we developed an extensive co-design and co-deployment methodology to try and enable innovative but informed design. HCI is not the right name for this research, it's about new processes of system design that incorporates elements of HCI in its core, some other phrase is needed.

In the FREMA project we experimented with a Semantic Wiki (a wiki where pages and links have types) to see if a community folksonomy (the set of types authors chose) would converge over time into anything resembling a designed ontology.

Through experimentation we showed that while creative interfaces helped authors, it was seeding the wiki that had the most significant effect on the quality of the emerging structure. This work was all about how communities expressed their knowledge, and how much they were aware of the process of knowledge construction. It certainly has elements of HCI to it, but again the term HCI doesn't capture it accurately.

As a final example consider the work we've done most recently on trying to redesign teaching and learning repositories, by examining how teaching repositories differ from research repositories, and exploring what elements of Web 2.0 design are most appropriate for them. Our more theoretical starting point led us to reject many of the commonly held beliefs about Learning Objects and repository design, resulting in a number of emerging repository installations that have a radically different feel to them (such as EdShare and HUMBox).

Once more our approach goes beyond interface design, and includes a number of more holistic factors, such as balancing the meta-data needs of the system with the tolerance of the users, and aligning the purpose and services of the software with potential users. If the term HCI is to broad to capture this, then what does?

This problem came to a head for me recently when I had to present our repository work at the first EdShare workshop. I needed to somehow express this process of aligning an information system with its users, in terms of both workflow and knowledge.

As a happy coincidence I happened to mention some of this work (in an entirely unrelated conversation) to Stephen Thomas from the School of Management, and he noted that it sounded a lot like ergonomics - the science of designing equipment (normally physical equipment) to fit the user. A few googles later and I had introduced myself to the discipline of Cognitive Ergonomics - the science of designing equipment to fit the mind - and the concept of Macroergonomics - a broad view of ergonomics that includes environmental and cultural factors.


So perhaps the work that we do is best described as a type of cognitive or Knowledge Ergonomics - the science of building knowledge structures and systems that fit the ways in which the users of those systems conceptualise, express, communicate, process and use knowledge.

In simpler words: building systems that better fit how people think.

Killer Semantics: The Challenges of Linked Data in Higher Education

This week I was at ECTEL - The European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning. The main event for me was actually the workshop for Semantic Technology in Higher Education (SEMHE), where I was on a discussion panel at the end of the day considering potential roadmaps for semantic technology adoption in HE. The atmosphere was unusually pragmatic for this type of event, with real open mindedness mixed with realism - that meant lots of discussion of pedagogy and the potential of linked data.

The question for the panel was what key challenges lay ahead for Semantic Technologies in Education and what might be the Killer Applications. I drew three things from the day that I used as a position statement for the panel:

1) Semantic Technology is often invisible - one of the commonalities of the work presented was that Semantic Technologies like RDF, RDFa, OWL, etc. were often hidden from users deep in the infrastructure. I've argued before that this is a good idea, and that a common mistake with Semantic technologies is to forget that it is for interoperability and inappropriately push it down to the storage layer (e.g. triple stores rather than databases) and up into the interface layer (e.g. graphs rather than forms). However, this does make it invisible to users - like a brilliant new engine oil it makes things run much more smoothly, but users may be unaware of the advantages.


This left me wondering about whether advocacy is the right goal for this community - rather than searching for the Killer Semantic Application perhaps we just let the engineers get on with it, slipping semantics in quietly behind the scenes without a fuss. This would leave us free to look for low-hanging lightweight applications, and to explore the impact on policy and pedagogy. This leads to the next two points...

2) Linked Data is Not Philosophically Neutral - Semantic Technology, and Linked Data in particular, is all about data interoperability and the power of data integration. But this means that, even in a relatively closed system, it involves transparency and openness that can be very threatening to both individuals and organisations. Linked Data will make it possible for students to compare Universities without the usual spin, it will allow Universities to compare students (or potential students) with cold, hard analytics. Linked Data changes the game.

This all means that Linked Data will be a major challenge to policy makers in institutions, who may not even realise what the technology is enabling before it becomes to late. In the past you could disseminate information about your University and market your courses without exposing your data for analysis. This will soon cease to be the case.

3) Technology Changes the Goals of Education - Open Information (i.e. data on the Web) has been very challenging for Education, we have seen a huge rise in problems with Information Literacy (students knowing good sources from bad sources) and in plagiarism (students cutting and pasting from the web). It is easy to lambast students for these academic crimes, but it misses a core truth. That technology has changed what we need to know and the skills that we must possess in order to get by in life. The value of information has changed, and recall is less important when information is available at the click of a mouse or tap of a finger. The problems of plagiarism are a result of educators trying to teach and assess skills that are not seen as valuable by modern students. What's the best way to write a short factual article on any given topic? Actually, a bit of Googling and Wikipedia cut'n'paste is probably the quickest effective solution.

I'm not arguing that this is a good thing (and I've not argued it before), only that it is a change that we must face (for example, by accepting that simple factual articles are no longer a good measure of student's research and rhetorical skills!). Calculators decreased the value of mental arithmetic in schools, allowing teachers to concentrate on higher level skills and methods, but mental arithmetic has side effects (such as improving mental agility) that were thrown out with the bathwater. The solution is not to ban calculators, but to try and understand how this technology changes things, spot the side effects, and develop strategies for managing the change so that we can put the baby back again.

We're still in the process of managing the change to Open Information, but its worth thinking ahead. What might be the impact of Open Knowledge? What happens when the Web can do the things from higher up Bloom's stack - comparison, synthesis, analysis? What happens when you can go to Google and not only ask 'Show me stuff about the English Civil War' but 'How does the English Civil War relate to American Independence?'

So my final suggestion for a challenge is a pedagogical one - what should we be teaching students who will work and study in such a world? What core intellectual skills will society need, and what problems will this technology introduce that will need to be overcome?

Technology has profoundly impacted on education, but the key technologies are not actually those that are specifically about learning. Email, the Web and WiFi have had a huge impact, far above things like QTI or LOM. Linked Data and Semantic Technologies will change society again, and I believe that this contextual change will impact learning far more than specific tools or killer applications.