magile

iSpot logo

I’ve been busy. Sorry. Very unbloggy recently. My contribution to the blogosphere and Twitter has been pathetic. Where was I?

Magile? = Mobile + Agile?

One of the reasons has been that I’ve been managing a project over the past year to create a participatory science mobile app for the iSpot project www.ispot.org.uk - actually it’s taken more than a year and we’ve had a bit of a bumpy ride with this one. I’ve documented the process in a conference paper that I’m pleased to say has been accepted for mLearn 2012. There’s a ‘stable beta’ version on the Google Play store, it’s really only a proof of concept as the more innovative pedagogic/technical features such as ‘around here’ (geo-spatial data about observations within a specific locale presented through a map view) and the posting of comments and identifications about other peoples observations are part of the new version which also has a fantastic user interface.

The paper focuses mainly on the reasons for creating a mobile app for participatory science and about the types of functionality and design considerations required during app development. I’ve quite pleased with the result. The paper iSpot Mobile –  A Natural History Participatory Science Application is available through the OU’s Knowledge Network.

If you’d like to try out the stable beta app (for Android) visit the Google Play app store (direct link to app) however before I move on from the app (there’s lots more I want to say about it but I’ll write a new post when the new version is released shortly) I want to conclude by saying that creating this has been an extremely liberating process. The work reminded me of the kind of hand crafting of HTML we did back in 1994/5 when building bespoke websites viewable through Netscape (if we were lucky) on our own custom built web servers based on Windows NT.  Thats what building this reminded me of, and I think that the HTMl5 v native issue will eventually get resolved but at the moment as Zack Epstein explains in his post the jury is still out! – which makes development expensive but hugely rewarding.

ispot mobile

 

I’m going to be blogging more about iSpot as we’ve got a busy 18 months ahead with this project. It’s part of the Wolfson OpenScience Laboratory project and has funding to internationalise, personalise, incorporate a social layer, work better for novice users, work via mobile, be interoperable or embeddable (through APIs) with other sites and services, and incorporate new ecology functions through funding from the The National Lottery, Garfield Weston Foundation and British Ecological Society respectively.

I’ve created a technical roadmap for iSpot to explain all this and I hope to regularly blog about what is happening throughout the next three years of that roadmap.

Lots to do I better get started.

Magile = Magic + Fragile?

Community Engagement

We ran an eLearning Community event on 18th October to explain the new learning systems roadmap and the direction of travel for OU learning systems – by “we” I mean that the presenters were myself, Liz Burton-Pye, Head of Learning Teaching and Quality Office and Rhodri Meredith, Project Manager (Business Change) in Learning and Teaching Solutions. The event was well attended with over fifty people from across the University and all from a range of different backgrounds.

Firstly the three of us gave short (*cough*) presentations to explain the “Where we are now” with Learning Systems, “Where we’re going next” (i.e. the new Roadmap) and “Over the horizon”.

Here are my slides from the event which set the context of the workshop which took place after the presentations (and a brief break of tea and coffee).

Future Learning Systems presentation oct 2011

For the workshop we split people into five tables. Each table represented one specific “scenario”. The scenarios were as follows:-

•  The Qualification is Everything
• OU Goes Global
• Informal Learning is Cool
• Learning is Disaggregated
• Employers Just Want Key Skills

These were picked because they were the five most popular scenarios rated by people who visited us back in March at the Open University “Learn About Fair“.

We were keen to try to get a good representation of staff from across the OU at all the tables and we had at least five people at each table. Every table was co-ordinated by a facilitator (i.e. someone who knew in-depth about the scenario being developed).

We gave each group a set of persona cards. The persona cards are representations of typical types of OU student (for more on this use of personas see the “How we use personas” blog post that I publish earlier ).

We asked people to then take each persona in turn…

…and answer the following questions to map the personas against scenarios using a form similar to the one below..

We engaged in some very interesting dialogue. When we finished each table then spent five minutes summarising what they had learned. There were some stimulating discussions and I know that I can’t do justice to them within a simple blog post but I’ll try to synthesise the main ones that sprang up during the workshop…

Informal Learning is Cool

Some people will use informal spaces to engage with a professional community (Martin) and as a means to an end. Some may not have time for informal study initially due to time pressures (Abila). However others like Jason who have had a bad experience with formal learning may find informal learning stimulating and engaging and structure can be applied later to keep him on track. The idea of having “Informal with badge” may be appealing, especially to those leisure learners like Margaret. Career oriented people may stay clear of informal (Win) but generally Digital Literacy may be a concern with  some personas and be a barrier to them engaging with informal learning.

The Qualification is Everything

Some learners may want to begin with an Openings module for various reasons before going through to qualification (Abila and Josie). Jason would want to build gradually perhaps through a diploma or certificate first. He would also benefit from community engagement and informal mechanisms to keep him stimulated and on track. Some students (like Rachel) may be put off by the level of commitment required.

Learning is Disaggregated

People like Win would like the flexibility as she maybe cannot commit to specific times (e.g. for assessment) but may also require structure so may be mixed blessing by going through disaggregated route. David may prefer structured approach but may also wish to choose an alternative assessment model as he may not favour continuous assessment.  Josie and Regi may both favour flexibility in their start and end times for different reasons. Some learners like George may be overwhelmed by disaggregation (this feeling over being overwhelmed keep recurring and is a known issue with a more small pieces approach).

Employers ‘Just’ Want Key Skills

Students use context for interest and engagement and learn key skills in the process. Do they need key skills personally or as a University should we provide them for others and are they useful? Split into two camps of learners who broadly agree that key skills would help with confidence building (Abila and Jason) and useful to have appropriate skills for marketplace (Martin). And those that disagree such as Rachel where the subject is more important to keep her focussed and the leisure learners such as Margaret who do it for the love of knowledge.

OU Goes Global

This was summarised through learner stories….

Student Story 1

In middle of studies, travelling and emigrating requires flexibility and ability to learn on the move. Use of mobile and internet cafes. Local partnership provides language adaptions and contextual content, using local payment and currency – makes use of Open media – setting different prices for different parts of the world.

Student Story 2

24/7 support very important of shift workers, added benefit and advantage, same for those with families. More flexible assessment due to shift work but students ‘hopping around’ is difficult for continuity of online advantage e.g. real time/ synchronous collaboration. Student follow paths/self-directed learning versus collaborating with others. Depends on nature of module. Put in as much variety to accommodate all.

Tutor Story

Tutor generated content from diverse tutor community (local knowledge). Good local examples from students.  Want local study but want it accredited. Uses mobile (or wifi) light versions of content but not interested in rich media. Tutor group listings via mobile or text alerts. Similar to email services currently on studenthome/tutorhome.

Summary

The overarching themes to emerge from the workshop were therefore :-

1. Learners need to be digitally literate enough to engage. We need to ensure they are provided with mechanisms to achieve that (handholding).

2. We could do more around exploring informal learning with “badging” to provide status associated with having understood material without having to go down a formal assessment route.

3. Flexibility and structure are both important so need to be built into the solution. The scenarios do not stand alone so a lot of the final discussions were about how they could be combined for greater benefit.

4. We need to be careful not to overwhelm potential learners. The “chocolate box approach” may seem appealing but actually just confuse people.

5. Feedback following the event is that some of the community wanted an opportunity to have an open ended discussion around the talks and topics arising. My suggestion is that people post into the discussion on Cloudworks associated with the event (..remember this is a public space!)

My special thanks to Chris Pegler for organising the eLearning Community events and providing us with design ideas, persona cards and event facilitation which made this event so effective. There are some more photos of the event on Flickr…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22884083@N04/sets/72157627885953291/with/6294169279/

Agile Ballooning

Over the next three months there are projects planned which will use 140% of the available resources. In reality this means that we’ve got to hire in freelancers and contractors to cover work and ensure we’re meeting all the commitments. All of the work is strategically significant and high priority, and I’m acutely aware that the funding available to make these things happen is only available until August is unlikely to be available again in the next couple of years so we have a small window of opportunity to get things done. I thought that I’d explain what the developments are and how we’re planning to manage them.

Firstly we’ve had a number of successful small bids by academic colleagues. One of the most interesting of these, led by Doug Clow, is the development of a community based version of iSpot - this project is called iSpot local and is JISC funded for the next six months. The project is around community engagement as much as technology and there are a number of Bio Blitz’s to engage locals. Because the system is can be largely standalone we’re using a freelancer to carry out the work and using a series of hooks to the main iSpot service. The plan is that the iSpot local modules will be made available and can be set-up by anyone using a generic Drupal instance. Then you request an API key to allow your service to connect to iSpot and transfer the data between the services. Without the key you’ll still get the local community toolkit but it only becomes really useful when you can overlay all the data, the ‘spots’, that are localised to your community. There will be a map which will be set to your region or area (you’ll need to configure it initially to set it for your region) and the sightings in your area will then be displayed. The freelancer is having to work pro-actively on a steep learning curve to get the services working efficiently but he has been making good progress and we’re confident that the system will be ready for the first Bio Blitz on the 21st May.

A second project which we’re currently involved in is around the aggregation and presentation of Digital Scholarship data, this is led by Martin Weller, this is interesting because it is getting data feeds from a number of existing services and pulling data to form a view of an academic’s digital profile. As Martin says

Boyer defines scholarship as being based around four functions: discovery, integration, application, and teaching. We can think of digital scholarship then as the changes in all four of these that are brought about by the impact of digital and internet technologies. For example, if we take ‘discovery’ to be largely synonymous with ‘research’ then a digital scholarship view would be interested in the way researchers are collaborating using new technologies, sharing and visualising data, forming research communities using social media, etc

Up to now we’ve been using a contract developer (Richard Greenwood) to build the service but Richard is now required on another project around developing android apps (see below) and so we’re employing a contract developer to complete the final phase of work which is around adding further data feeds and working with the researchers to develop the visualisations.

The third project we’re undertaking is to develop mobile apps for the iSpot service. iSpot recently passed the 10,000 user mark and so it’s at a stage where we’re considering the use cases and the baseline activities that need to be developed through to ‘production’ level service. I’m excited by the opportunity to work with the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute to create mobile apps. We’re concentrating on developing an app for Android and iPhone initially but we’re creating an API which can be used across mobile platforms. Richard Greenwood is going to be working on the API and also developing the beta iPhone app. The apps will allow users to easily use their phones to capture images and upload and share them. Because of the location specific information and the visual aspects of iSpot it is a perfect service to deploy as a mobile app and it will interesting to explore how things like the image carousel and mapping information can be recreated through an app.

The fourth project we’re working, led by Mary Thorpe, is called PePLE, the concept is to create a professional working environment to support social workers, as Mary says…

PePLE is a resource for the training and continuing professional development of social workers that can be used with flexibility to fit in with the operational demands of workplaces. The resources can be used to support independent study or existing employer led provision.

The site is unique in terms of the tools it provides and we had to make the difficult decision (as we did with Cloudworks) to use a framework other that Drupal for it because there were too many constraints within Drupal to allow it to be considered. By the way there’s a good blog post about the decision to move to CodeIgniter by another of the developers, Juliette Culver, for those that want to explore the pro and cons of different PHP framework environments. The work on this project is almost complete and the site is being used as a resource to support OU Health and Social Care courses.

The fifth project we working on is the development of the OU Media Player, which I’ve already blogged about in a previous post. Work is going to plan on this project but we’ve had to be very agile and flexible in our thinking and do some reassignment of work throughout the project, to ensure things get delivered as expected since there are fours units all working together on this project and the timescales are tight. There an early demonstration of the embed service in action (note not yet accessible!).

So these projects are all significant and all have deadlines of end of July. What are the lessons we’re learning for doing all these things together and with limited resource.

1. It’s the people who make the project work. Good people who are flexible in their thinking and are into solving rather than creating problems.

2. Being pragmatic. Don’t think you can do the ‘gold star’ service within three months. In particular getting a realistic scope and keep it realistic. The developers need to be good as deciding when the requirements come in how to manage those against existing ones.

3. Use freelancers and contractors where you can on the commodity items.

4. Keep reporting and documentation to minimum. Rely on the developers to self organise, using tools such as TimePanic to keep active tracking of their time on projects.

5. Organise meetings effectively. In the team we have a system which I’m exploring where we only arrange meetings on Monday or Tuesday and the rest of the week is purely for programming. This allows the ‘flow’ that is needed to develop. So all the team only arrange any project meetings on the Monday or Tuesday in any week. The meetings are kept short and a fixed agenda. I have monthly 1-2-1′s to check progress (the team use Google Docs to record their progress for these 1-2-1′s) and rely on project blogs to keep me informed of any day-to-day changes.

6. Issues are flagged up and recorded and resolved quickly and without fuss or blame. We assign an owner to problems and fix a date to have things resolved. We use the same Drupal module that Drupal.org use for managing bugs and feature enhancements. I bring in project support staff to assist me with organising resolutions if they involve multiple parties/units.

7. Ensure the developers are not ‘managing other people’s monkeys’, I use the 1-2-1′s as an opportunity to explore what the developers spend time on to try to ensure that the majority of time is on the development of the services and not on administration, design, support.

8. Be transparent. Keep active communication channels open with the project team, stakeholders and end users. This can be done in numerous ways and will help to ensure rapid feedback and iteration.

None of these things guarantee success but they help to reduce failure rates.

Monetising knowledge

”Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Albert Einstein (or so the legend goes)

Gill Kirkup, a colleague of mine, was last year seconded to a project exploring how you can put a value (in terms that those who look at the ‘bottom line’ can understand) on the social and environmental dimensions of procurement. Gill explained it to us recently at a meeting and I was fascinated by the idea.

Martin Weller ‘tweeted’ this week that every conversation he has had recently has been about money. This is very uninspiring and is especially a concern for things which themselves don’t necessarily demonstrate benefits that you can put a cost on, speculative research and development for example and services that are hidden or where their benefits are slow to be realised, or where the emphasis is about improving or maintaining quality.

How much should universities invest in free and open access to knowledge resources when faced with a funding ‘crisis’ and public sector squeeze? – What subject areas should be removed from the curriculum to target the skills needed for employers, and how does that impact on our ‘knowledge economy’? – How many universities will drop research completely as it becomes less financially viable to maintain compared with charging higher fees and rolling out a STEM based curriculum model competing with the ‘for profits’ sector? – What in the end is the role of university to society?

I have no answers only questions….but I don’t think we should be all about monetisation and I’m interested in what Alex Salmond of SNP has said about pledging free education. Here are a couple of quotes to finish…

“And out of educational access came social mobility as we reached all the talents of a nation to change the world for the better – we can do so again.”

“We would only fail if we were to betray our traditions and mortgage the future.”

Strong rhetoric. Perhaps we need more of that.

Are waterfalls agile?

People talk about agile but what do they really mean by agile?

David Matthewman CIO, OU

I read a very insightful and interesting interview with David Matthewman, the OU’s newly appointed CIO, in Computing Weekly and I’ve also had a number of discussions with him about development and programming. In the interview he says “As part of a more disciplined approach to market methodologies, Matthewman will be introducing a more prolific use of agile and scrum development, as well as service management standards such as ITIL.”

I think this is a move in the right direction for the OU and for other organisations who similarly have adopted up until recently very traditional waterfall methodologies for enterprise level system development, however agile development methodology on it’s own won’t solve the problem. I read a paper last week commissioned by Hays for example which was about agile development called “The Elephant in the Developers’ Room” – it’s kind of drawing conclusions it wants to make the case for agile, but the headline statistics alone are stunning:-

• 60% – 80% of project failures can be attributed directly to poor requirements gathering, analysis, and management, costing US businesses $30 billion per annum
• 50% of major projects (defined as costing >£10m) are cancelled when at least 40% of spend has been incurred
• 40% of system problems are found by end users
• 25% of all spending on projects is wasted as a result of re-work
• Up to 80% of budgets are consumed fixing self-inflicted problems
• Only 8% of large-scale applications projects (those that cost between £6 million and £10 million) succeed.
• Just 16% of software development projects close within acceptable constraints of cost, time and quality.
• Cost overruns of anywhere from 100% to 200% are common in software projects.
• IT workers spend more than 34% of their time fixing software bugs

Anyway I had a twitter discussions with some developer colleagues, which is by the way the best way to solve the worlds problems, and the conclusions were as follows:-

Agile methods alone wont fix the problem of very large developments failing.

Here are some of the practical reasons why very large projects fail from experience with projects of 60m+ which I been involved in with SUN and Microsoft and others who do this stuff well on the whole:-

1. Some issues are behavioural to do with the makeup and background of the team
2. Some are to to do with poor management, not specific project management but people management and lack of ability to think creatively, direct appropriately and react (important as scope changes)
3. Project scope changes, so some issues are to do with inflexibility, not reviewing scope regularly and adapting
4. Some are to do with lack of empowerment of developers, making them both understand and grow, giving them challenge and enabling cross working
5. Some are to do with siloing of activity, “only X knows about that” mentality
6. lack of ownership of issues “not my problem mate” – it’s everyones problem
7. Good (critical) people leaving during the project. Perhaps there’s a place for a ‘golden handshake’?
8. Some are to do with complexity. i.e.not breaking the big complex system build down into smaller manageable chunks.
9. Some are to do with people not understanding the vision. Everyone must understand it.
10. Finally by far the best projects I’ve worked on are ones where everyone contributes to the solution, feel tied to the success of it. The reporting, logging and reviewing processes serve a purpose that those in the project understand, i.e. it’s directly relevant to assisting them and their colleagues. The organisational structure is kept light and serves to help development, rather than for MI alone.

As we move into a more commoditized, off-the-shelf, ROI, SLA, cloud-based, shared solution, outsourced, yield enhanced and recession proof world it’s important to remember that the ‘uniquness’ of an organisation is created through the innovations that come from within rather than without. Developers can still add that uniqueness to an organisation by building bespoke services very well and at scale.

We’ve just started a venture to develop the OU Media Player for example which is going to create ‘the worlds’ most accessible media player’. It’s built using existing services but we’ll add the value to make it provide captioning and accessibility services and to link to all OU media materials on a variety of platforms including the VLE. This is a very small team working over the next five months in an agile way. I’ve got 100% confidence in it’s success because it’s a great team, everyone understands how important it is to the OU and they’re being given the freedom to build it iteratively, creatively and well, i.e. serving the OU’s mission in being “open and accessible”.

Hidden Influence of Social Networks

I’ve been interested for the past few years in the inference that can be done using publicly available information. The web means that people nowadays give quite a bit of information away freely in their public profiles. There are now a number of tools which automatically attempt to link peoples user accounts together based on profile information provided and there is a lot of other information that is picked up through the routes and links that people click through and make determinations about the type of person, sometimes referred to as social graph privacy.

I found the article “Eight Friends Are Enough” from a group of researchers at Cambridge interesting because, using data provided from Facebook, it seems to support the claims that much can be inferred by the information provided by the person and by their peers (friends). I’ve seen various media articles using this research to make bigger claims for example there was an article in last week’s Sunday Times about how governments are using this type of information for political gain, removing dissident factions and controlling populations. Our own government for example is conspicuously scanning email traffic looking for terrorist threats.

It will be interesting to see how things pan out in the future. I already know that for example I have spent money buying things that were brought to my attention through services designed to target advertising to me based on my previous preferences. That’s a small and some would say innocuous example of how information is used. Humans are influenced by others, the ‘wisdom of crowds’ can sometimes mean that large numbers follow a direction because they see ‘trending’ on Twitter or highlighted on Facebook. Is this any different from reading it in print? - I think the difference is that if you think enough of your friends have liked something you may give it extra gravitas. So the more of the social network we engage in the more our individualism may get polluted? - Or perhaps it no different from going to the pub and agreeing with people just to keep them happy?

Certainly the web opens opportunities for social influence marketing, and consequently for other uses of that information.

Here’s an interesting video on YouTube by Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks

Hmm. Ripples in the pond.

Future Learning Systems

If you do one thing this week then watch the YouTube video RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms by Sir Ken Robinson.

Inspirational? – yes I thought so.

I gave a presentation to the OU community last week about future learning systems. Barbara Poniatowska, Liz Burton-Pye  and I presented the current VLE state, 1 year planned and 3-5 year vision respectively a set of short talks and followed these with a “World Cafe“. If you haven’t come across the concept before then I encourage you to visit the website and find out more about it. It’s basically a way for people to think inspirationally around issues, moving between tables where facilitated discussion takes place and there the tablecloths are used by people to write out their ideas and to link them forming a ‘web’  and evolution of thinking. I decided to adapt this a bit and instead of getting people to simply write thoughts and ideas we also asked people to go around afterwards and to add a tick next to the ideas or comments that they most endorsed.

We decided on five themes of “User Generated Content”, “Communication and Collaboration”, “Assessment”, Joining Up” and “Supporting Students Online” (Joining up was about exploring new markets, linking to OER, globalisation etc.)

This worked very well,  for example here is the tablecloth from the table  where the discussion happened around “user generated content”

I particularly like the ‘fuzzy felt’ suggestion. I think there’s a killer app waiting just around the corner .

Seriously though there was a good discussion around the subject and what was interesting was that on tables where the facilitators were from operational units the discussions focused around the ‘here and now’ and on tables where the facilitators were from other units the discussions were more future focussed. This wasn’t because of the facilitators themselves because they’d all been told to allow the discussions to flow between the 1 year and the longer 3-5 year visioning but for some reasons the conversations naturally gravitated in that way. I suspect that there we some ‘historical’ reasons why some discussions were more rooted than others. i.e. the legacy systems that people may love or hate but recall when thinking about what to deliver next.

Overall I really enjoyed the event we had over fifty people attend. I have noticed one or two comments on a very particular subject that are on every tablecloth, some one or two people really having an axe to grind but the method of using the ticks helped to cancel out bias as the really important things for most people got lots of ticks.

If doing it again I’d suggest the following:-

1.       Have some clear ‘feeder questions’ at each table to steer discussions

2.       Have the facilitators shape conversations (or even stop them) if they’re focussing on an area outside what we want to capture. Brief facilitators before the event to explain that.

3.       I think it’s OK to allow the personal agendas to surface as long as they’re within scope and people then construct solutions to the issues raised. So moving conversations past what’s broken and onto the ‘ideal solution’.

4.       Again around personal agendas I think these are fine as long as we provide something like the tick/cross idea which I think worked well to allow people to judge how significant they thought particular things were. This means that personal agendas can surface but may not get many ticks compared to issues which are more ubiquitous/significant to many. There’s also a point to be made here that all concerns raised are legitimate and need to be considered so should not be dismissed (Barbara reminded me of just this point recently and it should not be remembered when gathering requirements to gather them all).

So what were the big ideas? – I’ll reveal one from each topic that I think they’re worth sharing.

Big idea 1. Build widgets/gadgets that are platform neutral to provide services  that follow learners between environments, allowing for VLE and ‘small pieces’ system types. In particular these widgets should provide contextual help and online support and collaboration with other students.

Big idea 2. Provide methods to allow academics to easily leverage other OER material (produced outside of OU) so we become a consumer as well as producer. Use Learning Design to help foster this. Also provide better routes between informal (OER) and formal environments.

Big idea 3. Support (through internal research) prototyping of methods for rich web 2.0 assessment. Once established build into course design where appropriate (again course models and learning design).

Big idea 4. Provide methods to allow students to share content found elsewhere, including references. Allow methods for others to comment and annotate on these shared resources.

Big idea 5. Provide services to allow students to engage in forums and Elluminate and other synchronous/synchronous tools outside of their module (course). Including pre-registration and alumni stages. Make registration process simpler to allow the student to ‘continue discussions’ throughout their learning journey.

I think these are all great ideas and there were more like this which can’t be shared outside the OU but which I’ll be making sure the Learning Systems Visioning Group consider when they next meet and I’ll be pushing to get some of the exploratory work progressed to make sure the OU’s future learning system isn’t just an off the shelf VLE tool but rather actually meets the needs of 21st learners who quite rightly expect more from their education.

Google Bad Day?

I heard about the demise of Google Wave last week and I’ve been reading a large number of the hundreds of blog posts and tweets that accompanied it and continue to do so. I’m not going to try to capture all of these but the TechCrunch and Mashable articles are as good a summary as any.

One article suggested that Google does simple things very well but doesn’t do complex things well, it suggested that where the concept (not necessarily the technology) is simple, such as with search and mail, it flourishes, but where there is more conceptual complexity or a larger leap forward then Google struggles.

I’m not sure that I totally agree with this argument but during the week when Wave was ‘crashing against the shore’ as someone put it I was taking a second attempt at swapping from using iPhone onto an Android device. In this case the Google Nexus One.

My primary motivation for the swap was some rubbish customer service from O2 when trying to change my “bolt on” on my account.

Anyone who has tried this and has texted the number that O2 provide to get a response “you are not subscribed to that bolt on” as a response and then had to deal with a call centre in some far flung country where you get assurances but then find you’re charged for the service you have asked to cancel will understand my frustration.

Anyhow coming back to Android the main downfall of the Nexus One in my opinion is the complete failure of Google to support devices which might need to connect to Wifi networks in ‘work based’ environments and to provide methods to address different ‘proxy’ and network types. There are 623 messages on this thread in the Google Code forum but the upshot is Google did a bad thing omitting this and haven’t addressed it in the 18 months since it was first highlighted. For me this is a ‘show stopper’ and not only did I attempt many of the suggestions and found them unsatisfactory solutions but also having spent this much time on the issue I was not very pleased with how the Android phone is set up considering it doesn’t rely on ‘syncing’ with a PC and therefore the importance of the Wifi connectivity should have been paramount to the success of the device in the workplace.

It would put me off buying it in a corporate capacity or recommending it to others to do so until this is addressed. It doesn’t seem to be affecting the take up for the device by end users but I think Google are missing a big market by not fixing this problem. (and only working with some Wifi networks, e.g. eduroam, is not enough).

It may appear in my blog posts that I’ve got a firm opinion on these things but that’s not the case and I’d like to hear other opinions about how well or badly Google handles the delivery of the more complex. I’d like to think that Google can put Wave and Buzz behind it and start afresh to hit Facebook in the social arena after conducting some good research, or studies research done by others and investigated the area well enough to deliver something that users really want.

I want to end by saying that I used and liked Wave because it did bring something new to the table in terms of allowing the blending of synchronous and asynchronous sharing of ideas and it could have been developed into a strong CRM or mind mapping solution for example, but it wasn’t in itself enough to provide stick-ability. It needed a killer application.  Buzz is in danger of suffering the same fate however I applaud Google for trying though and not a lot of concept stuff becomes commercially viable so accept that and move forward to the next big thing.

Death Through Immersion

I was both fascinated and appalled last weekend when I read about the South Korean couple who let their own three month old child starve to death whilst they were obsessed with rearing a ‘virtual child’ in the SecondLife-style game Pruis online.

This was covered in a number of newspapers but a couple of good articles are the Telegraph and BBC News

I haven’t heard of anything exactly like this occurring before although there have been cases of individuals letting a child die in favour of some addiction (internet or otherwise). Perhaps someone can correct me and show that it’s more common than I imagine – and that would be even more disturbing.

I’m currently part of the supervisory team of Jo Iacovides who is doing a PhD in the area of engagement and informal learning (through games). We regularly have discussions about the level of immersion and the increasing depth of reward and interaction required by gamers. Heavy Rain for example takes gaming in a different direction. I read a good article in the Independent interviewing David Cage the creator of Heavy Rain. He’s quite weird and I’m not sure I totally agree with his future of gaming but you can’t deny that he is pushing boundaries.

I do start to wonder though about how far immersive gaming is taking us and where it will lead. There are already immersion suits for gamers and anyone who has tried the 3D Gaming experience will know that it does lead to a deeper sense of ‘being there’ - couple that with a richer set of ‘rules’ and characters with humanistic characteristics then add a sense of responsibility and reward – Now we start getting to towards the truely scarey SciFi Virtual Reality future as predicted by  Tad Williams “Otherworld” series or “Better Than Life”, “Matrix” et al.

When games and the virtual world gets to be more interesting and rewarding than the real world then VR will just be another type of psychoactive drug, a wonderful one in which people have a greater level of environmental choice than with a hallucinogenic and this will make it very powerful and dangerous. If you think I’m being fantastical here then read this Virtual World article  from 2008 and judge for yourself. I believe this Korean couple had a number of other things outside the game which influenced their behaviour but none the less it continues to make me uncomfortable.

We truly live in interesting times however I hope we’re going to be responsible about what we create for the next generation.

Future Thoughts on Gaming

I’ve been listening to Jesse Schnell (Professor at Carnegie Mellon) on his thoughts about the future of gaming development. He talks about beyond facebook games and club Penguin et al. I think I predicted some of the ‘big things’ he mentions but he does have a point that the really big things are regularly unexpected success stories.

I’ve also visited the Serious Games institute in Coventry this week. They’re working on simulations and on exploring EEG devices such as the Emotiv and Neurosky headsets which are Brain Computer Interface devices.

I won’t comment on the brain computer interface devices in detail as there is ongoing research by SGI and they’re comparing them to medical rated EEG devices (to give a baseline) and assessing the quality of the interpretation. I expect we’ll all benefit from that research and it will feed into our bio-feedback gaming research work at the OU.

I will say that the research work is fascinating and although the technology is still ‘green’ I think there is great potential. I think in a year or two this will mature into a very useful technology. I see it being most useful in the research arena although I know that Neurosky in particular are looking at the end user and brain control gaming (Star Wars Force Trainer etc. ) – The technology is still either a bit fiddly to use, requiring a lot of set-up and configuration, or a bit simplistic. I also think that the software could be improved. My concern with it is that I actually like using an artifact ‘controller’ to game and I can’t see that training myself so that when I blink I throw a grenade, or when I think ‘push’ I throw a rock is actually any more stimulating in the long run than doing it through a controller. Especially controllers with sound, rumble effect etc.

The SGI visit was cool and the stuff they’re doing on helping with real world situations through games based simulation of crowd behaviour is going to really have high impact once they perfect the rules and programs.

The rise of 3D gaming is also interesting to observe and is ramping up thanks to Sony and Microsoft  and others. I’ve blogged about it previously but this year it’s predicted to become more mainstream.

Augmented reality gaming is also coming to the fore with various augmented reality apps for the iPhone either out now or on the way. For example Sky Seige – Still rough but likely to get better throughout the year.

Then there are the new genre of games like Heavy Rain that are set to blur the boundaries, mixing storyline and games that are very much player driven in a way that the story depends on the actions to provide a really immersive and deeper experience (theoretically).

So it looks like we’re getting to a stage where there are lots of good things coming but perhaps within this scattergun of gaming diversity we’ll find several really big successes.