Fond Farewell

Martin Weller managed to blog about this first with his post Goodbye to Two Colleagues - As with Martin I’ve been avoiding using this blog for personal posts however I’m making an exception in order to say a fond farewell to Ross Mackenzie.

Ross is leaving the Open University (N.B. he is not retiring, nor being made redundant!) – he is leaving to pursue higher ambitions and explore. During our time together at the Open University he is someone who has regularly made my working life much more bearable, especially over the past few years, by providing interesting back-channel conversations on twitter and email during meetings which usually turn out to be much more productive than the meetings themselves!

Ross has achieved many valuable things for the university. I still remember Promises (can’t remember which bits of this acronym are capitalized, or indeed what it stands for!) which was about conformance of an online presence for modules across the curriculum. I think that was a real achievement as previously everything was much more bespoke, hand crafted an unsustainable. This project paved the way for the VLE which was another one of Ross’s achievements ( I was also drafted in to advise Martin Weller with the groundwork about what an institutional VLE should include…. the old Sakai v Moodle debate and loosely coupled v tightly integrated – those were the days!).

I worked with Ross most recently to get VLE changes completed to upgrade to Moodle 2 and incorporate many new features (called RAP – Roadmap Acceleration Programme – accelerated because it achieved three years worth of work within one year!)  - I remember Ross was the person who first expressed support for use of personas – and I’ve tried to take that work forward and we’ve had some success with this although there’s more still to do to get personas embedded, however without Ross they might not have been explored at all.

… it hasn’t all been about work. It has also been about having someone who is prepared to speak up in favour of educational technology and who is prepared to look for  a ‘yes’ when the easiest answer (but not the correct one) is to say ‘no’. I value having Ross as a colleague over the past many years – for the anecdotes and witticisms that make my work enjoyable.

…I wish him all the best on his travels to Arctic landscapes in search of elusive beasties that might eat him (hopefully not) and I expect that our paths will cross in the not too distant future.

Built-in Obsolescence

I had a few days off and took my wife’s bike to the shop to get it fixed as she was complaining about the gears slipping and I thought it may need a new gear sprocket. When I got it there the bike shop owner showed me all the other issues with it. It’s only half as old as my bike but poorly maintained so suffering! – Anyway he said it was about £100 with labour costs to fix all the parts and so it was marginal whether it was worth repairing. I decided in the end to get her a new bike but I’ve since taken the old bike home and fixed it up using parts from other bikes.

The point of this is to say that when I was growing up we had bikes that lasted for decades. The thought of upgrading was never there. Bikes were all the same and parts interchangeable and cheap. Now it appears that bikes have gone the way of other technology. New bikes have more gears than previous versions and the parts are so expensive (compared to a new bike, as bike prices reduce) that it becomes easier and cheaper in many cases to upgrade than to buy parts if there’s a problem. It’s also though because culturally we are changing technology quickly. The rate at which people burn through mobile technology would be staggering to previous generations. It’s true too of PC’s and laptops. As good recent example of this is that the OU is likely to need to invest around 1 million to replace all it’s PC’s to have a new generation that work with Windows 7.

Think about that though for a moment. There’s no doubt that new PC’s are better than old but this is being decided by the Operating System where presumably people have said that it will be more costly to maintain older PC’s than to replace them all to run with the new OS. It’s also about a constant need to move forward, refresh, and not be behind. There are benefits to moving to a new OS but one of the big drivers for this is that older OS’s wont get supported after a certain date. This is the built-in obsolescence.

It suits supplier businesses to build a ‘time to live’ into their products which is just long enough for people to get attached to them but not so long that they can’t be moved onto the ‘next big thing’.

Whilst I’m on the subject of time to live I want to say that there are many fantastic technologies that have driven human progress including the space shuttle, Concorde and Harrier jets to name three.

These technologies were built to respond to a specific set of circumstances and they preformed their purposes fantastically well. Economically it may make sense to get rid of these but they leave a gap in their wake that won’t be filled easily. They also represent the best of human inventiveness. I hope that doesn’t get lost as humans build things on the nano scale and go for smaller, cheaper, faster technology consumables.

But do technologies have a shorter time to live now? – How does this model square with the ‘make do and mend’ recession culture, and also the green ICT (or lack of) of replacing iPhone versions every 6 months to get the latest apps? – I’m concerned that a cultural shift needs to happen both with manufacturing and consumerism to change habits and make people think more about the ‘burn through’ effect and to find models that are more environmentally and ethically sustainable.

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.

Anthropomorphizing Technology

I’ve just read an extract of Clay Shirkys Cognitive Surplus book in the Times along with a very good interview about him and other web gurus. Unfortunately you have to pay to get Times articles these days (hmmm. Ironic) but there’s a good review if it in Guardian. There are lots of good videos on YouTube of him talking about the concept of cognitive surplus so I encourage you to listen to them.

…anyhow I could spend the rest of the year dissecting Shirky’s writing because I love his enthusiasm and agree with much of what he says but what I wanted to get out in this post is the fact that people are really anthropomorphizing technology. He does it and Skirky has particularly emotional prose about the internet and how when he used the internet in 1992 it was an emotional experience for him (his brain flipped out!), his compatriots do it when they write about the internet and technology and we’re all doing it as a society.

I was out drinking with Martin Weller the other week (always a bad idea) and we got to talking about the fact the friends of ours talk about a piece of technology with such irrational love and affection that to an outsider it seems bizarre but to us it’s quiet normal although we might not always share their love of a particular technology. Some people at the OU for example love FirstClass because we’ve used it at the OU since the mid 90′s and some feel a kind of ownership of it that others might not.

It’s not just ownership though but a sense that the technology is life enhancing.  Take the recent ‘buzz’ about the iPad. When all is said and done the iPad technology is not a big leap forward from that of tablet PC’s or indeed from Apple’s own iPhone but it really got into people emotionally in a way that I haven’t seen a technology do to the same extent before. It was slightly scary to see the reaction of some people to it and how they talk about it as if it is a living breathing thing.

I think there are two distinct patterns here.

1. A kind of addictive quality to new technology where it fills a gap that people never knew they had.

2. A sense of ownership and stakeholding for technology that has been around a long time and has given that person a wholesome experience over a sustained period of time so that they have become personally involved with the technology in a way they wouldn’t have imagined when they first saw it.

Both these have parallels to relationship building. The instant attraction of new lovers, and the slowly growing deep love of long term relationships.

…I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Cities Turn To Rubble

I’ve been reading articles over the past year by a number of people amongst them John Naughton, Luis Villazon and Stephen Baxter who have all give some views about how the current technology is influencing our society. Stephen Baxter wrote a fantastic piece in BBC Focus magazine a few months back about it which was a vision of how people will work in small communities and the idea of cities will just that since they will have broken down and the people dispersed. 

Machu Picchu

I do like considering how the technology in our society influences us both on a daily basis and also in a more ambient and subtle way over a long period to make changes that are felt across the globe. A good example of this is the way people have integrated mobile phones into their lives. Love them or hate them they now form part of our connected presence. I regularly use my iPhone to pick up emails and to book events or browse the web when I’m on the move. I see people using their phones all the time. This is not just a western but a global phenomenon. 

There are potentially much bigger changes however happening across our society and in western culture the economic downturn and destabilization of transport services through industrial action in the UK is influencing people to think seriously about video conferencing and conducting meetings remotely (VR, Unified Comms, etc.) – A good example within the OU of this is that last year we hosted a big conference called “Making Connections” which was well attended. This year it has been decided to run this as a “virtual event” and Martin Weller is leading the organisation of the event which takes place this Summer and I’m contributing my knowledge and support with the technologies for it and Elluminate are partnering with us to provide the event. There will be a number of nationally and internationally renowned keynotes however I’ve been asked to keep quiet about the lineup until it’s officially launched.

 

The whole event will be organised to be available totally online and will be location neutral. I’ll be interested to see how successful it is but it’s just one of thousands of meetings that now take place in the virtual rather than by a traditional face to face method and academia is actually behind commerce in embracing the use of new technology to support distributed meetings. 

Other influencers are the green issues and the combination of green and economic is driving people to consider purchasing locally, reducing their travel costs and to grow their own food and become more self sufficient. I was at a wedding a few months ago with friends who are scattered across the globe, with ages ranging from mid twenties to mid forties, and the conversation turned naturally during the meal to the things we’re all growing ourselves. I was amazed that almost everyone at the table was growing their own fruit and/or veggies in some cases in such large quantities that they were providing it for their local community. 

So whilst I don’t think that cities are going to turn to rubble overnight (you only need to look at the population figures for greater London to see that cities are still doing very well thank you!) I do think that over a long period of time the things that are currently moving people subtly in a particular direction, using cycles rather than driving, buying locally, travelling less, communicating online rather than in person etc. will impact more on our society on how we live. 

traditional farming

The idea of smaller well connected  ’village like’ groupings, forming their own socio-economic communities and becoming much more self sufficient is one that harks back to the wartime but also seems to be in tune with how the world is shaping up today.

Star Trek Tech

 

Back in 2006 I attended the Star Trek exhibition at the London Science Museum (here’s a photo of part of the exhibit).

It wasn’t just some nerdy event (!) but also a way of demonstrating how far we have come in meeting the challenges of creating the kind of Science Fiction tech that we see in Star Trek. At the time it was pretty impressive, from the medical through to communication and analysis tech we had come a long way. However the world has moved forward since then obeying Moores Law quite accurately.

I was therefore interested last week to see that they now invented a ‘cloaking device’  - the first step on the path to a 3-D invisibility cloak. Cool. So here are some others…

Start Trek                                                    Equivalent

1. “Phaser to Stun”                                        Tazer

2. “Phaser to Kill”                                           Laser guided weapons

3. ”Communicator”                                       Mobile phone

4. ”Tricorder”                                                  Mobile Phone or PDA

                                     (possibly with Sciencescope attachments)

5. “Medical Tricorder”                                 MRI scanner

6. Holodeck                                              3-D holographic projection

                            (immersion suits, immersive VR environments)

7. Replicator                                                   Replicator (3-D) Printers

8. Universal Translater                               iPhone app

                                                            or Phraselator (U.S. Military tech)

9. Scalpel Free surgery                               Laser surgery

10. Jordy’s visor                                            digital cameras and

                                                           tongue devices help blind see.

11. Communicator earpiece                      Bluetooth headset

12. Force Field                                                Plasma bubble

We live now in the world inspired by the Science Fiction depicted in the early Star Trek. I hope however that as we ‘boldly go’ forward we continue to explore the macro as well as the micro and to be pushing outwards as well as exploring the inward workings of our world. I worry that we’re using technology as a crutch for everyday living rather than as tools to project us to new and rewarding (off world?) experiences.

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.

Web 3.0 – I don’t think so.

I’ve been reading several articles recently about the semantic web including one in last week’s Computing magazine. The article cited Tim Burners-Lee as espousing the benefits of the semantic web for the past decade and now it seems some progress is being made, albeit in small areas.

The latest to roll off the shelf is Powersets semantic search service. It searches wikipedia only at the moment but is set to go further soon. Importantly it searches via conversational techniques and is supposed to provide a more intuitive experience. So this is the future of the web, already being tagged web 3.0.

I was rather hoping that web 3.0 would be a little more than a sensemaking tool, not that it’s not useful but I imagined web 3.0 to include neural interfacing and total immersion, webTV and augmented reality. Speaking of which I saw the bionic eye technology (actually a bionic contact lens) being developed in Seattle by UoW. They showed a working demo of the technology in action on a recent episode of click.

ALT Lab Open Day (UK)

I was invited to present at the ALT (JISC) Lab Open Day event that took place yesterday in Oracle’s headquarters in London. Patrick McAndrew and I presented two sessions in the afternoon showcasing our new Ambient Technology Research Labs which are part of the new £19m building that will be the focus of our research work from May this year when we start moving in and using it. There’s a summary of the event here - we’re not part of that summary however a video interview of Patrick from the event will be available shortly and is being posted up on YouTube so I’ll send that when I get it. For those interested in our talk there’s a copy of the presentation which may be meaningless without Patrick’s or my waffle!

The event was great because we’re all doing such similar stuff, Sara de Freitas from the Serious Games Institute at Coventry seems to be covering much of the gaming stuff that we do and Nottingham and CARET are both looking at mobile learning and SOA applications which parallel our work in those areas. I was pleased to see that CARET seem to share the same views about not trying to ‘roll everything’ into a VLE but rather are now starting to explore pushing vle content out through other means (Facebook, iGoogle, RSS, etc). I was interested in their work on Sakai, I think sakai is much more developed than when I last explored it and I must make time to revisit it and indeed the CamTools product suite.

Nottingham covered their work with us on the Technology Enabled Learning (Personal Identifier) project which explores how school kids might learn through conducting their own field research work using a range of technologies and then bring this back into the more formal classroom environment to collate and make sense of the results. It’s really exploring the informal/formal learning boundaries, but on a lower level trying to make it fun for the kids. The Director of the institute at Nottingham watched their first field trial last week with (12-16 year old) school kids and was absolutely amazed at how engaged they were with what was essentially number crunching, but it was number crunching to find out what their physical characteristics were (blood pressure, heart rate, BMI, etc.) after they’d used various devices to record information about themselves whilst they were in a leisure centre, they were all keen to find out what their results meant and compare them with each other.

Patrick used the event to try to gather interest from others in forming a research network with us at the hub, I’m not sure how much interest this got but we’ve made a number of great contacts and I’m going to be taking trips to a number of these places in the next few months to find out what they’re really up to and to try to collaborate on some educationally and technology rich research projects.

Horizon Scanning

 I’ve been very busy recently but today got a short period to catch up on some things and I want to share a summary of my favourites with you.

(1) IBM is looking at 3D Gaming for business and education. In particular for staff development through their Innov8 product, there’s a CNET aritcle about it here . It’s a bit of a clunky product by all accounts but it’s the direction they’re taking that interests me most.

(2) Alfresco, the Enterprise Content Management System provider, and in my opinion one of the best providers which also happens to be Open Source rather than costing businesses and arm and a leg for a poorer product, is releasing version 1.9 which includes integratino with a lot of open source community tools including Facebook, Mediawiki, iGoogle and so forth. This again is more interesting because of the direction taken and the fact that other ECM vendors are starting to follow suit.

(3) Holographic T.V. (think of Starts Wars and the “Help me Obi Wan…” projection of Princess Leia from R2D2). Researchers at the University of Southern California have perfected a 3D image projection that can be viewed from any angle using only a spinning mirror and a holographic diffuser (whatever that is). Imagine the uses for such technology, Truely interactive T.V. where you can go around (and through!) the action, staggering.

(4) Nintendo have produced the iFit (following on from iSports) which has a whole host of games to improve oneself. It comes with a balance board pad that you stand on and works out your BMI, and it covers sports, exercise and yoga type activities and provides you with “Brain Training” style feedback on how you’re doing and what it believes your ‘fitness age’ is. Scary.