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 :-/

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.

District 9: A Watchmen moment?

District 9, the new film directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson, is getting a lot of good press. Critics like the vision of the young director:

"District 9 proves that genre films, besides being a hell of a lot of fun, can say things you hadn't considered and show stuff you haven't seen." Time.com

They like the quality of the acting, and the special effects:

"District 9 is the rare arms-and-ammo flick in which the central human performance is as high-caliber as the hardware." Washingtonpost

And they like the setting; squalid Johannesburg slums in the blinding glare of the African sun:

"Who needs Manhattan when there are so many megalopolises and sprawling slum-republics about which brilliant films like District 9 can be be made?" Telegraph

I liked the film a lot too. Despite a slightly flappy story, the heavy-handed metaphor and a short-change ending It's almost certainly the best sci-fi film of the year and possibly the film of the year. You should go and see it.

But what really struck me about it was not the quality of the acting, the set-pieces, nor even the CGI, but the construction of the film itself. This is an oddly put together piece that starts as mockumentary, before descending into a more traditional third-person style, but peppered with news stories and spliced with character interviews and soundbites. Honestly, bits of this film resemble Transformers, and other bits resemble The Office.



Different scenes draw from different filmmakers and styles, but there is only one thing that the whole reminds me of, and that's not a film at all. What Blomkamp has done is pick different styles purposely and deliberately, his choices have cinematic and story purpose (for example, the mockumentary approach quickly normalises the bizarre idea of an alien slum, the news clips establish the broader context and set up audience expectations, while the action-packed third act accelerates the story and creates a sympathetic context for a little sentimentality).

This postmodern raid of the stylistic drawer reminded me heavily of Watchmen - not the mawkish film, but the brilliant original graphic novel. What Alan Moore did with Watchmen was use different media to get past some of the shortcomings of the comic medium. He interspersed the graphic chapters with letters, book chapters and newspaper articles, and even interweaved a second text, a comic within the comic (The Tales of the Black Freighter). The medium is the message, and with Watchmen the genius was in the telling - which is possibly why the literal film translation was a little disappointing.

Well, Blomkamp is doing with film what Moore did with the graphic novel. He throws away convention and presents a disrupted narrative, making stylistic choices that make his film deeper and more interesting while keeping it lean. It's just different enough from what we normally expect to be a little disconcerting, but it's very effective.

I liked this film a lot, but I'm more excited about what it's shown us is possible. These past two decades we have gotten a little to used to the polished tropes of epic sci-fi, District 9 reminds us that there is another way, that filmmakers are free to draw on all the facets of our media age and make their films the way that best fits their story rather than our expectations.

Changing the Blog Roll

It was about two and half years ago that I belatedly jumped on the blog bandwagon. I had resisted for a few years because I already had a perfectly serviceable website, but by the beginning of 2007 it was increasing apparent that if I wanted to continue to teach and research people's relationship with digital media and online content then I really should be one of the guinea pigs.

I've got a surprising amount out of it, from simply sharing fun stuff I've discovered online, or getting things off my chest, to developing ideas that are a bit to speculative for academic publication. I've discovered that for a professional academic a blog can fill the scholarly hole left by journal letters and other informal correspondence, it's a good lightweight way to get ideas out there and participate in community discussion that may or may not lead to a more formal publications.

It also turns out that it's a perfectly good way to put other types of occasional content onto the web without having to mess up a perfectly good site-map, although its a bit of a reality check that my Ticket to Ride map gets more monthly hits than my academic-style articles - even if you add them all together :-/

Old site design: Blogger

I chose Blogger out of laziness, and went with one of their standard templates, but it's been looking more and more tired, so this week I started having a play with the templates, and have redesigned the site using the SoulVision open source template and an icon set from WebTreats.

New site design: SoulVision

Twitter may have taken the place of short and pithy posts, but all things considered I've enjoyed being a blogging guinea pig, and I've had a lot of fun writing in a less formal style. Academic workshops, conferences and especially journals will continue to be the gold standard for new science and research, but there's a soft spot in my heart for the humble blog and the new voice that it can give to all of us.

Adolescent 30's: Grand Theft Morality

Two years ago I wrote how the arrival of a bouncy baby Wii for my birthday had caused me to revert to childhood, well my birthday has rolled around again and this year I received a much more mature and responsible present: an XBox 360.

I know, I know (holds head in hands), I'm just so late to the party. However, there comes a time when a man must put away childish things, set aside his Wii-motes, and tackle a series of 18 certificate gaming titles.
Before you do that you need to set the XBox up - and it turns out to be a large, heavy, noisy, warm and rather clumsy beast. Having spent nearly 18 months in Apple Nirvana, it was an odd bump to return to Microsoft land. Setting aside the ludicrously tiny 256MB memory, probably the nastiest surprise was being fleeced for the leads. For some reason the HDMI cable didnt seem to transmit audio (could be my TV for all I know) so I need to connect an audio component cable the AV slot as well as use the HDMI connection. However, the component lead supplied with the XBox covers the HDMI port when plugged in, meaning that you cant plug both in at once, and instead are forced to buy a special Microsoft lead (for 30 ukp) to do the job for you.

Awkward, and perhaps just one-of-those-things? No, I'm afraid not. The component lead is intentionally too big, designed to make you shell out more cash, but in fact you can do something about it. Following this advice I broke the cover, removed the fat piece of useless plastic blogging the HDMI port, and managed to get the original lead working alongside the HDMI connection just fine.

Microsoft, you are truly evil.

Since getting the XBloat 360 up and running I've been venting my frustration on Gears of War 2 and Grand Theft Auto 4 (which makes me feel really old because the last GTA game I played had a top down view :-(



Both are a lot of fun, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for GTA4 in particular. What is so cunning is the way in which it gently coerces you into a life of crime. Starting as a legitimate taxi you pootle around the town being careful to avoid other cars and pedestrians and doffing your hat to the occasional police car, but then a few missions cause you to get a bit reckless, drive dangerously, get into a fight or two, and you realise that there are no consequences to your actions. The character you play, Niko, deals with the gathering mayhem in such a matter of fact way that its all nicely normalised, and before long you're tearing along pavements, pedestrians bouncing off your bonnet, while strafing police cars with machine gun fire.

This is no smiley Wii-faced party-game, this is a full on case study of social disorder, nihilism and psychopathy. I think I'm going to enjoy it :-)

Thank you for the music

For over two years now we have been able to download music online - and by music I of course mean music that you have rights to, music that you own, music with no Digital Rights Management (DRM). In fact the trickle of real music download sites became a flood when Amazon stepped in, and this year even iTunes decided to let you buy music online.

This is great news. DRM technology was the result of small-minded pernicious thinking, and I am glad to see the back of it.

I'm not sure where we got the view that technology should replace social responsibility, we don't seem to be keen to do this elsewhere in our lives (if we did our cars would all have speed limiters and we'd all be wearing electronic tags), but hopefully now that the media companies have grown out of this view we can start to have a sensible conversation about piracy, funding models and the criminality of file-sharing.

(don't worry, it didn't and it isn't)

Perhaps the first step is to move the conversation about piracy into reality. The image above is from the 1984 campaign to save the music industry from home taping. Twenty-five years later the music industry seems in rude health, and you might think they would be sheepish about their tendency for exaggeration. Sadly, while the technology has changed, the overstatement lives on.

Hats of to the Guardian newspaper for challenging the figures and for looking at the real evidence about how we spend our disposable cash. To summarise: if you unpick the industry figures they assume that every download is a lost sale, and that each lost sale is worth £25 (if you follow these figures through that would mean that each UK citizen would spend a third of their salaries on music and movies were it not for piracy - this is clearly a fallacy). In fact the Guardian points out that the amount of money spent on media items over the last ten years has actually risen (its almost doubled to £8bn!) but that music as a proportion has fallen (the increase is in DVDs and Games).

So if piracy isnt the problem that the industry makes out then what are we to make of file-sharing and of file sharers? In his latest podcast Steven Fry made an impassioned call at the iTunes festival for a change in the way that file-sharing is viewed, and called on the industry (he is the first to point out that it is his industry) to stop prosecuting and criminalising ordinary people.

He makes a number of interesting points, top of which is that piracy is not the same as theft (they are demonstrably different processes, whatever the ad-men say), and that casual file-sharing should not be criminalised as piracy, but as a natural part of human behaviour that self-regulates across different social and financial circumstances, ultimately harming no-one. Although it's far from proven, the sales figures we have already mentioned seem to support this hypothesis - that in general people buy what they can afford and act within a sensible moral framework.

This does not mean that the industry should not be looking at alternative funding models. Spotify is probably ahead of its time (let's see how their mobile apps pan out), but advertising and subscription is certainly one approach. There is also money to be made from live performance, and the sale of rights to other media that has a more secure funding basis (such as pre-pay TV or movie ticket sales).

The music industry is not a sacred cow, it has no right to make money hand over fist, and while I respect the rights of musicians, singers, producers and writers to make a living and have their work protected from abuse, this does not mean that things should not change. Simple economics dictate that if music/media is more available then it will also be perceived as less valuable.

As long as it's still viable, I'm not sure why the rest of us should care.

Torchwood Ex Machina

The BBC have just screened the final episode of the five night Torchwood season three, Children of Earth, and already the fan sites are exploding with debate about characters lost, plot holes, and open endings.

I don't normally watch Torchwood, but I was pleasantly surprised by the mini-series. It was well-made, intelligent sci-fi.



There were flaws, mainly in the actions of the government, which was realistically evil but uncharacteristically feeble (when will people learn that our government is dangerous precisely because it is capable!), but I have tremendous respect for the way that the series challenged our conventions of heroic sacrifice - through the tragic homosexual romance of its leading men, and the cold-hard rationalism behind not only the government's actions, but also those of Captain Jack in the final concluding moments.

Perhaps most impressive part of all was the final conclusion. This is so difficult to do in a grand story, because Act II is so necessarily dark and full of despair, that when the light finally shines it can seem trite and forced. But Torchwood paid for its particular Deux Ex Machina moment - and the cost fitted the theme so perfectly that it concluded the story neatly, without leaving the viewer feeling cheated.

Having praised modern American drama, I was very happy to see similar quality on the BBC. Torchwood aired on BBC 1 and apparently attracted nearly 6 million viewers. It was brave of the BBC to pitch this over five consecutive nights, and very brave to put this subject matter on at prime time, but I think its worked. Torchwood is not genius - check out Psychoville for that - but this was solid mainstream sci-fi drama, and a real return to form.

Ticket to Ride - New UK Map

A few years ago I created a UK board for Ticket To Ride, the excellent board game from Days of Wonder. Since then the board has been downloaded thousands of times, and I've received loads of kind comments from players around the world who have tried it out.

Earlier this year I was contacted by Ken Meyers, an American who fancied having a go at updating the board. I'm pleased to say that Ken has just finished his update, and the new version is now available from Ken's website.

I think Ken has done a fantastic job, some of the key improvements include:

• A new map graphic that better replicates the canvas look of the real boards
• A 100 space points counter (my version used the original 80)
• An improved spread of colours around the board
• An improved track layout (sticking more to the grid layout principle)
• More destination tickets (a la the 1910 version of the game)

I love the fact that someone has taken the time and trouble to improve the board in this way, and I'm genuinely impressed by the effort that Ken has made. If you're into Ticket to Ride its definitely worth taking a look at his version, and remember to send Ken a note via email or BoardGameGeek to say thanks.

Prepare for Disruption

Back in November I wrote a blog article on the momentum that was building behind Open Educational Resources (OER) and I have just published a similar essay in the Language and Linguistics Area Studies (LLAS) Liaison magazine.

When I was writing the article I was hoping to address many of the concerns that teachers and lecturers raise over OER, such as worries over copyright and competitive advantage, but I increasingly found myself seeing OER as part of the Education Sector's response to a significant challenge - the Web as a disruptive technology:

"It seems that the Web is changing the balance of power; in the future Universities will no longer be seen as the primary custodians of public wisdom, there is a need for us to reinvent ourselves as voices of authority in a more open information world.

The growing movement for Open Education Resources (OER) is one attempt to rise to this challenge. OERs are teaching materials that have been released into the public domain, normally through one of the Creative Commons licenses that makes it free for public or educational use as long as the original author is acknowledged.

The argument is simple, by developing OERs Higher Education Institutions are able to contribute to the public information space, share new ideas, raise the profile of teaching, and give individual academics a more public voice."

Having also written recently about the demise of the TV industry I think that its likely that any industry that is based on information will need to change its business model or practices. Higher Education may be dealing in knowledge and learning, rather than just disseminating information, but it will still be effected by this change in values.

Increasingly what I like about OER is that it's pro-active action to reorientate ourselves to a world where information itself is of low value. The core business model of Univeristies, providing an education for a fee, may be reletively stable, but the way in which we deliver that educational experience, and how we participate with broader society is likely to change dramatically. If we accept OER it should mean that we are better prepared for that disruption.

Web Literacy Revisited

How do modern students study, and how good are they at it? That's the question posed by the emerging topic of digital literacy. Last week I attended the Shock of the Old event in Oxford that addressed this question.

The topic of digital literacy is particular interesting to me because for the past year or two I've been trying to make sense of the new attitude that learners seem to have towards technology, and back in November 2007 I coined the phrase Web Literacy to describe that attitude. For me Web Literacy is not about a person's age or background, and it doesn't refer to their ability to use technology, instead it is more about their "... 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".

Literacy vs. Literacy

At Shock Tabetha Newman presented a Becta review she is completing on digital literacy, in which she concludes that there are three ways to think about student capability:

1. Their knowledge of, and skill with, digital tools and applications
2. Their ability to think critically, and evaluate and analyze information sources
3. Their social awareness and ability to represent themselves digitally

The first of these is what I would call good old fashioned Computer Literacy, the second is Information Literacy, and the third seems closely linked to Web Literacy. In fact I think Tabetha means it more broadly - so its our social skills and abilities in all learning contexts - but I think its still a pretty good match.

We had a number of discussions about how these things do or don't map onto Generation Y or Digital Natives. Those two terms have fallen out of favor in the last year (partly through overuse, partly because of their shaky scientific origins) but its still useful language with which to discuss the current and impending mismatch of skills and expectations between teachers and students.

My view is that both students and staff actually have a similar level of Computer Literacy, and that recent evidence (and our own experience working with students from nursing and social work) indicates that this is more varied than you might expect for both groups. The real mismatch comes in the other two areas.

Students tend to have poor Information Literacy, but good Web Literacy; this means that they do not have the search and research skills HE courses typically need, they find it difficult to assess information sources, and don't appreciate plagiarism or respect attribution in the ways we might want. However, the same attitudes enable them to interact much more freely online, and they are able to merge their online and digital experiences much more effectively.

Staff on the other hand tend to have good Information Literacy, but poor Web Literacy; this means that they are very good at finding and assessing information online, but are reluctant to participate in online interactions and view the virtual world as a separate (perhaps unimportant) space.

It is interesting to see how there might be a tension between these two skillsets - as higher Information Literacy is likely to reduce the trust and openness necessary to build a high Web Literacy.

The PLE as a Way Forward?

One of the problems that institutions face with Web Literacy is that it means that students are increasingly escaping from institutional IT systems, and learning in-the-wild. For some Universities this is a problem in itself - how do we monitor them! - for others the problem is put in more progressive terms - how do we support them?

At Shock there was a good presentation by Palitha Edirisingha and Ricardo Torres Konpen (from the University of Leicester) about an experiment they have running to help students build their own PLEs from third party tools. For example, how to use the Google Suite of tools, or how to incorporate a number of applications into Facebook to help manage learning. Students reported that the experience had changed their approach to learning, and had strengthened the social relationships between both students and staff, although they had required guidance to deal with the complexity of managing their own learning toolset.

Miles Metcalfe, from Ravensbourne College, gave a spirited presentation on their approach to supporting personal learning by directly supporting personal technology. Rather than help students build an explicit environment, they support them by helping students purchase personal technology and by making sure that their IT systems are open and cope with heterogeneity. This results in funding moving from traditional IT (such as workstations and networks) to personal IT (such as laptops and wireless).

I really liked both of these approaches, they are technically lightweight, but emphasize a need for a supportive atmosphere and an open attitude to student's tool choices.

The VLE and Digital Literacy

Shock was also my first experience of the Twitter soundbite. In reply to someone's comment I noted that the VLE is the last refuge of the digitally illiterate - and then watched as my tweet was retweeted around the world.

It's a pithy note, but I meant it sincerely. If digital literacy is really an amalgam of three skillsets including Social or Web Literacy then how can the VLE, a place where teachers can hide from the greater internet community, possibly promote it.

The VLE is a safety net that supports people who are not fully literate, this could be a good thing but not if by supporting them it also prevents them from developing those skills.