Reflections in the pond

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently on ‘institutional activity’ which I’m not supposed to blog about because it’s ‘business sensitive information’ and I’ve also been doing some work which is so sketchy that I’d feel a bit stupid putting it up for public scrutiny (example looking at and giving presentations on brain-gaming and future of mobiles in 2015 etc.) I have however finally got a bit of time to piece together some things which I think are useful reflections on recent work.

1. Mobile phones are starting to become the augmented reality devices I always wanted them to be. iPhone is accelerating this change and Android and other more open platforms are assisting. The technology is so ubiquotous (3.2 Billion in September ‘08) that it’s a real transformative technology. For a look at my talk visit http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?docid=12387 

2. I’ve started running ‘hackdays’ where a group in my team get together with a group of academics and web savvie people and build something to prototype stage within 24/48 hours in a skunkworks type way (lots of coffee involved). The first one we did was partially successful but the results are yet to be available publically, the second is on “Digital Scholarship” and we’re going to build a set of services around that working with Martin Weller. I really am going to push for this as a methodology to JFDI (Just F*ing Do It) as a release early and often kick-off model which may be something we do more of on JISC projects etc. where we don’t have lots of resource time but we could vertically slice and get small amounts of a lot of peoples time over a short period. I’ll keep you posted on outcomes

3. The “world class” Ambient Technology Labs are now in action and we’ve been promoting these externally, I have given tours of our facility to Maurice Heilblum (President of Elluminate), Diana Laurillard (Chair of Learning and Digital Technologies, LKL) , Mike Sharples (Director, LSRI) and Christine Borgman (Presidential Chair in Information Studies, UCLA) to name but a few. This is all very exciting and they all seem impressed with what we’ve got, the challenge now it to turn this into some active collaboration and build a profolio of active research projects using the facility. I also like the ambassodrial role but find that after sorting out ponies in the mornings I need to take a shower before meeting these people lest they get the wrong impression about my personal hygiene!

4. Lots of really cool web stuff that I’m playing with, huddle and twiddla and so forth, I’m going to post on these things in another blog cos it’s too much to cover now but I’ve got some great ideas of how to apply these in the learning and teaching area.

Picking Pears in LilyPad

Happy St Paddys Day!

Last week I managed to go through the gateway and enter LilyPad and stole some pears which I’ve brought back to Dog Town and planted to become pear tress, they sell for 500 bells each which is five times what my native peaches sell for.

Animal Crossing Gang

What gibberish you say! – I’ve managed to get online and share stuff with a colleague (James) and his family through Wii speakand Animal Crossing. It was really the kids that did the stealing of fruit from the other village though so I can’t take the credit and it’s probably setting some kind of poor example but it was all done with the villagers permission and they did show us around the village and we met some odd characters. Great fun. The synchronisation is not perfect and sometimes the ‘host’ characters would appear to vanish then reappear, because they were moving much faster than the connection could cope with, but generally it was good enough to make a usable part of the game. The audio was fine quality but with about a 2 second delay I would guess (Two second going out and back so probably about a second end to end). In any case fairly good for audio conferencing given the amount of bandwidth the gaming aspect was taking up.

What else did I do this past week. Well I’ve got an HTC S740 smartphone which I’m trailling. It’s going to be configured to work with the R2 service ( from microsoft technet) – It allows the phone to pick up wifi networks inside campus buildings and auto route my internal phone extension to my mobile. I’m excited to try this out.

I’ve been asked to help develop a course using Nintendo DS. I’m considering developing a research proposal around this as I’ve got people from Computing department who want to develop apps for their students. I think that the DS is probably the most overtly learning focused console in the types of games it provides so it’s a natural choice and the the homebrew development environment is relative easy to pick up by the looks of it.

Question is does my team explore gaming tech or mobile tech as we’ve also been asked to produce some iPhone Apps. Patrick McAndrew and I have thought of some development ideas around good open viral apps for the platform (more on that soon).

Old School and New School Gaming

Last night I got my Wii USB Ethernet adapter and connected my Wii to the ADSL router and configured the Wii for wired networking and voila! – I’ve found a world of fun exploring all the old school games from the online shoppe! – It’s absolutely superb. I had a real nostalgia rush when I started going through the catalogue. I’ve not got any points yet so I’m off to buy some (don’t have Visa so I’m going to have to go to a real shop to purchase my points) but then expect to not hear from me for a while as I’ve seen some from my distant past. If anyone has played “Secret of Mana” or the original Donkey Kong series, etc.

I’ve got WarioLand the Shake Dimension for the Wii and we’ve got Animal Crossing which the family are still aaddicted to. I can’t even get a look in! – The WarioLand game is OK and is reminiscent of older Mario fares but not quite as enjoyable, not sure why but I suspect it’s because of the ‘value’ of the prizes. i.e. the game has lots of bags of money scattered throughout and you collect it through many different mechanisms (mostly involving shaking the controller violently to get Wario to shake up the bags and spill the coins) but the pursuit of wealth was always secondary to the goal of completing levels and I think it’s too highly valued in WarioLand so I find I have to go back into levels to collect enough coins to get maps to the next worlds which for me is less fun than just tearing through the levels and getting on in the game.

Animal Crossing as I said is much fun, Nikki won the fishing competition last week and the kids are all obsessed by the latest fashions and hairstyles, it’s got a level of ’stickability’ that I find quite fascinating for a game that doesn’t really go anywhere. Having said that now that I’ve got the network sorted I’m looking forward to exploring other villages and using the Wii speech system (which we’ve got as well with the game) to try some virtual meetings. I want to particularly compare this to more conventional forms of video conferencing and to SecondLife and I’d be interested in hearing what other people think about it as a form of social interaction online. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Diddit and other online badness

I’ve come across Diddit.com which is suggested to be the next big thing for adventure junkies and others who like to brag. Those in the ‘know’ are claiming it’s going to be the next Facebook. Basically people can post up ’brags’ or diddits about things they’ve done and also about things they want to do (wanna dos). They can also write stories. I think it’s very appealing and I get the idea of it. I think it would be great to have a SocialLearn strand to this and it definitely has a nice social dimension to it.

I’ve read two articles recently about the perils of online environments. The most recent by Catherin Blythe  in the Independent. These things are interesting to read and interpret but the Indy in particular has been going on a bit of a facebook rant and I’m not sure I agree. I think that online interactions can add to the interactions you have in the real world and enhance peoples lives. They should replace those though and maybe that’s where the problems arise. Online interactions are less passive than watching TV, so you gain something over TV from them. Similarly face to face offer opportunities over those so again you gain a richer interaction. Telephony for example has been around for generations and so we’ve always have a level of remote connectivity.

I feel that the problems are not from technologies themselves but how we use them. I think that we need to develop the correct protocols for new technologies to embed them correctly into our (and others) lives. I can go for periods without using Twitter but when I do use it I value it. My followers number only 50 and are people I either know in real life or would expect to know in real life through work or other means. I don’t have any fantasies about having a huge following and making eclectic friendships online, mainly because I’m very happy with my real world friends and I feel ‘grounded’ with that group. but by virtual interactions enhance that experience and draw me closer to them.

I do however agree that abuse of TV and prolonged passive web browsing could damage peoples ability to correctly make inferences. I think over use of any single media is dangerous - but that’s not down to the media, it’s down to the people.

Reducing the Digital Divide

Two things caught my eye that may help with reducing the digital divide.

The first is called Sakshat, announced by the Indian government as the worlds cheapest laptop, which some predict to sell for £7. (by the way Sakshat apparently means “before your eyes”). I have been a slight sceptic when it comes to these schemes in the past, simply because I think that those that have saved up £7 and are in the lower socio-economic bands will not necessarily spend that £7 on a computer, they may still have other considerations, however it will undoubtedly bring the prospect of computing and education to larger group of people and that’s no bad thing.

I think I mentioned before in my blogs that when I met Martin Bean (formerly of Microsoft and soon to be the Open University’s  new Vice Chancellor) he was calling out to us to explore global education provision for the X million programmers in India who would like proper training and accreditation but who are not able to receive that through traditional Indian Universities because there is not enough capacity to meet the demand. So extending the hand of education to free or low cost resources to large number would be a fair way for a University to widen participation without hurting (because additional volume makes up for low margins).

The second thing to catch my eye was Google’s latest toys including Latitude their new phone/map social gadget. Google made several announcements recently including offline for gmail and docs (as part of Google Apps). perhaps I’m banging the Google drum too much these days, many say they’re in line to be the next Microsoft. I however think that creating services to allow for people with poor bandwidth or connectivity and to provide services for large groups and through ‘ubiquitous’ methods and devices. This can only be a good thing and reduce the digital divide.

I’m particular keen to try out Latitude as it’s got incredible potential in my opinion for education, both in terms of ‘contextual awareness and enhancement’ and also the social and peer group interaction (like mini twitter streams amongst people who are geographically or otherwise connected to each other).  I’ll try it out and let you know.

Viral Learning?

I’ve been in a few interesting discussions recently with people about the creation of viral learning environments or the development of more personalised, social and informal learning. Which happens anyway and which we (the OU) could be involved in wrt improving affordence.

 Martin Weller did a piece about Creating Virality in Education which brought up some interesting ideas.

We recently had a presentation by Samantha Peter, New Business Development Manager for Google Enterprise (Education) their education vision is not centred around advertising but rather bums on (virtual) seats, so it’s a more viral model and more adaptable. This means they evolve products quickly to meet demand and the Google Apps for Education suite shows this, the Spreadsheet and Forms components have been significantly improved over the past year (who said they couldn’t do pivot tables!). Microsoft are playing catchup in the cloud computing arena, and Googles products are much more fully formed than they were when I last explored them. This means that Universities are jumping into bed with Google, I recently met with reps from five UK Universities who have made the decision in the past twelve months to use Google Apps for their students and the number of institutions involved is growing rapidly. As the Director of IT at University of Westminster put it ..

“We had a bizarre conversation with Google where they were offering all these well tested, easy to use, fully supported, free products for us to use and our IT folks were trying to pick holes with them. In the end we asked the students and they we 95% in favour of going with Google”.

Most Things Fail First Time Around

I attended a talk by a colleague Niall Sclater (head of the Learning Innovation Office) yesterday where he presented a lecture about innovation and began by asking the audience to turn their mobiles on and twitter or use backchannels if they wish whilst he talked and said it was his task to make the talk interesting enough to keep people engaged. By the end of the talk it was clear that this experiment had not been a total success, the room mics were picking up the mobile ‘talk’ the short bursts of beeps as they try to get signals and at least one delegate questioned him about the fact that the noise was interfering with her enjoyment, questioning whether is was polite to have phones on when others were trying to listen.

I think it failed because of two things:-

1. The technology in the building had not caught up with the changes in the way some people engage and interact with technology. Therefore a technology issue that could be avoided and will be solved as time passes and they design mics that work with mobiles and don’t pick up such ‘talk’ and people feel empowered to text or twitter etc. without disturbing others.

2. Social or cultural awareness of how people use the technology, there was clearly a notion that turning mobiles on would mean that people were not engaging in the presentation and it is seen as a ‘disruptive’ technology however the person next to me (Doug) was on his Mac twittering about the talk and many people were picking this up around the Uni as I found out afterwards. It’s this kind of back channel that makes the technology really add advantage, people outside the talk and ask questions (via people there or directly if they had put up a twitter stream) and people in the place can keep others informed and also have a log of what took place.

I question why people feel so offended when someone uses a mobile compared to someone having a notepad and pen. When you’ve got those things (as I saw in the lecture) some people were doodling and sketching, it’s socially acceptable to do that and be relatively disconnected from the lecture but it’s not OK to use a mobile phone (silently) to do something that is equivalent to taking notes? – There’s a stigma attached to mobile devices and perhaps we need to ‘get over it’ at least a little bit if we want to move forward.

Finally everything fails first time around, when we experimented with using streaming media back in the early 90’s for online course use it only worked for around 50% of the audience (because of the complexity of setting up the client software at the time, sound card and network issues etc.) but now it’s a no brainer as Youtube demonstrates. I think you’ve always got to push the envelope and be prepared to fail at least once before technology and culture catch up.

New but Gold?

I posted a message about Old but Gold games and consoles some time ago however over the past month we’ve been experimenting with what percentage of time we spend on each game console (I have to say that the kids are restricted in how long they can play them so they don’t spend too much time on any!).

I spend 40% Wii, 30% XBox 360, 20% N64, 10% SNES

Nikki sends 70% Wii, 30% Nintendo DS

Kids spend 50% Wii, 20% Xbox 360, 20% Nintendo DS, 10% PC

Most popular game in our house at the moment is the new “Animal Crossing” game for the Wii, the rest of the family are totally addicted to it and I like the social ‘hooks’ it gives you to keep you playing it. It’s not a game that goes anywhere (i.e. no story as such) there are no specific tasks and it feels more like Second Life than a game as such EXCEPT that there are games within it, for example we were in the fishing competition last weekend and Nikki won the cup!

The thing I find most fascinating about it is the way you get pulled into the social etiquette. Simple example, Bethany (eldest daughter) had a bit of a run in with one of the villagers who was a bit rude to her, she complained about him to the council and then he went around for weeks in a huff and eventually left the village. There are other things like this - how you respond to people, what you say about their clothes etc. changes the way the game plays out. There are also events and special dates (New Years eve was great …and no I wasn’t on it at midnight!). The world changes over time and things you plant or do affect the environment.

All these things keep you in the game, some may call this boring but my kids love it so “old isn’t quite so gold” anymore in our house!

Why Clowns are Dangerous

clown photo

I have long suspected as much from my many tramatic clown experiences as a child (not me clowning you understand but being emotionally scarred by ugly men in lipstick and makeup dressed rediculously trying desperately to entertain me). Now my own children have confirmed what I always suspected that Disneyworld, CentreParcs and all those places that produce large versions of your ‘favourite animated characters’ using people dressed up in big furry suits is not endearing or enjoyable.

The latest piece of evidence is from my 2 year old daughter Hannah who got hold of one of the other kids Stars Wars annuals this morning and flicking through the photos announced “Why is man dressed in silly costume dad?”, then “There’s another dressed in silly costume “(Jar Jar Binks and C3PO respectively – I hope I’ve got the names right for all you aficionado’s out there!).

Now I don’t know about other families so again extrapolating up from my own, whenever they meet a giant 10 foot tall version of Yogi Bear confronting them in a holiday camp, their first reaction is not to give said bear a lovable hug but either .1 Run away screaming or 2. Say “Why is man dressed in silly costume”. I’m glad that Hannah has now reached stage 2. Surely survival instinct alone means that you should NOT say to kids that it’s OK to hug giant bear, or strange men in funny outfits either.

This is my first post for a while but I intend to get back on that pony and blog again for good or ill. There is some technology focus in this post by the way C3PO is an android and if he were a real one would we treat him in the same way as a man in a silly costume? – I think running away screaming is generally the safest option.

Old but Gold

I’ve recently plugged back in all my old games consoles from N64, Gamecube and SNES. I’ve revisited many of the old games again and fallen back in love with them.

They have genuinely great gameplay that leaves most new console games offering standing. It’s not just me that thinks this my kids who have never played things like Super Mario All Stars or the original Donkey Kong Country game or Diddy Kong Racing or the original Zelda games have been pestering me to play them and have started saying things like “the Wii is boring” when I suggest they play Wii games instead. I know that you can get some of the old games on the new platforms but the gameplay seems to be better int he original. Possibly because the lack of resource and interface actually forced developers to think creatively. Hmmm.. discuss.