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.