The internet for academics, part two!

Using (and not using) your VLE

It may be that your university's policy requires you to use your VLE for certain tasks. If not, try these alternatives:

To collect work and distribute documents, try www.drop.io or www.dropbox.com. Dropbox is especially good because it creates a kind of 'my documents' that you can access from any computer, and you can share specific folders & files with other dropbox users. They're free and they work really well. You can see who added what when, and who took what when too.

To set up discussion groups and forums, try www.ning.com. Again, it's free and very good.

Google has an excellent calendar function. You can make as many calendars as you like, and make them visible or invisible with a single click.

Bookmarks

Do not keep your bookmarks in either 'bookmarks' or 'favourites' in your browser. You won't be able to see them when you're on a different computer, when you change computers, or when you change browsers (which is worth trying - try the browser 'Chrome'). For bookmarks, try evernote (excellent and private), or delicious (very good and social).

Email and contacts

Don't keep your contacts in your university email account. If you do, when you leave your university you will also lose all your contacts. If you can, route your work email through a third party. Google mail is good. It's free, has lots of capacity, and google will let you export your email data to other providers.

Lectures and presentations

www.Flickr.com has millions of images on a 'Creative Commons' licence - you can use them for free and legally as long as you attribute the source. You will find better photos on flickr than you will on a google image search.

www.prezi.com is a freemium service for creating presentations. It is much better than powerpoint. (Freemium services have one basic option that is free, and several other options that have a cost. Lots of freemium services are very useful.)

Online presence

At the bare minimum, you should have active profiles on academia.edu and linkedin.com. Set them both to email you with weekly digests of activity so you don't have to check them all the time. Put up a photo of yourself and a means of contact that does not go through the site itself (e.g. email).

Bonus credit

If your name is available as a domain, such as www.zoerose.com, buy it. You can buy it at a domain registration service like www.godaddy.com. This will be useful to you one day, even if you don't use it just yet.

Get on twitter. It's better than you think.

Write a blog. Use wordpress or blogger. Follow other blogs. If you can't be bothered maintaining your own blog, contribute as a guest to collaborative blogs.

Make a website (preferably in the domain you just bought). Link to your published articles and keep an up to date list of achievements. Include a photo of yourself.

Because

The more you do now, the better positioned you will be when the next phase of the internet comes along. Which it will.

And it will be really, really cool.

The internet for academics, part one!

(As inspired by an argument at the pub.)

Dear everyone I know who is an academic,

It's time we talked about the internet. Specifically, it's time we talked about You on the internet.

Here are some things you already know, or at least suspect:

1. Your Virtual Learning Environment.

You probably have a VLE. Your VLE is probably called Moodle or Blackboard. You can't work it properly, and you can't find functions that you think are pretty basic. When you try to do something fancy, like a quiz, it doesn't work and your students get confused. That is not your fault. Your VLE probably makes you feel a bit dumb. You are not dumb. Your VLE was designed to meet teaching needs 10 years ago, and those needs have changed. Your VLE hasn't. It is OK to not like your VLE.

2. Your IT staff. Your IT staff are good people and they want to help you. They won't necessarily know what you need, and sometimes, you won't either. The biggest problem you will probably have is updating software. You don't have 'admin rights', and that means you can't change the software on your computer, including updates. They can. So ask them.

You may also be using Internet Explorer 6. If you are, they internet will not work properly for you from now on. Ask your IT staff to update your software when your computer tells you to.

3. Your technology/innovation team. These people have a different name in every institution. They love computers and they're good at computers, but they don't always communicate what they know well. They probably have some terrific tools for you to use, so, ask them. Talk to the innovations people.

4. Your online presence Your presence might seem quite good. The question is how much control you have over it. Google yourself: Do any of the first ten (i.e. the only ones that matter) results contain content that accurately reflects your work and interests? If the answer is 'no', your online presence is not yet up to scratch. People are googling you right now, and you can and should influence what they find.

Next: Part two, the easy fixes.

Finding creative commons images

I'm a big fan of Creative Commons Licences. I'm a big fan of flickr CC images. But I find the flickr search interface... not so good.

This flickr search tool, however, is outstanding:

http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/

In my experience so far, it pulls up a better standard of image than flickr's own search engine - and you don't have to fiddle with the (kind of hard to find) flickr settings for 'search CC only'. It also searches all fields - title, tags, or description - and provides results in order of 'interestingness'. Recommended.

wikipedia from the coal-face

My Dad recently got upset by an article on Wikipedia that was close to my family's heart.

It was a good article, but it did have to do with family business. Unfortunately, this business was both very personal and very, very public. The public element (which was to do with maintaining safety in the community for innocent people) was the only thing the article documented.

I thought it might help if I explained more about how Wikipedia works and why it matters. This is what I told him.

*************************************

Hi Dad!

I'm sending you this as some info about how wikipedia works, and specifically, how much no-one is in charge (and how very, very seriously the wikipedians take that.) Personally, I really think that the decentralised control is beyond a doubt the best thing about wikipedia. It's what makes it good. It's the thing that means it can never be taken over by anyone, not for politics, not for religion, not for anything. I really, really think that it is a good thing that no-one controls wikipedia, because it will always be more-or-less right (even if it's never *totally* right). No government could ever turn it into a propaganda tool, and that matters. It really matters. And it really matters that people take it seriously.

To demonstrate this very important point about people taking wikipedia seriously, I'm going to use a really, really stupid example. Let me introduce Bryan Peppers.

The only thing that matters about Bryan Peppers is that he is very, very ugly. (If you click the link below, you'll see - he's very, very, very ugly.)

Bryan Peppers turned into an internet 'meme' - something that lots of people know about for no really good reason (in this case, the (bad) reason was because he's ugly). Eventually someone made a wikipedia article about him. And another person (a lot of people, actually) argued that the article should be deleted. Someone else (a lot of people, again) said it should stay. More people said it should be deleted. And so on. After a LOT of argument, Jimmy Wales Himself - the Founder of Wikipedia - stepped in. He said that the article would come down for one year, and if anyone cared after that, they would review.

Here's the thing - LOTS of people cared. Hence Brian Peppers day.

In 2008, a whole bunch of people Kicked Up a Fuss on the anniversary of the Brian Pepper takedown. They didn't particularly care about Brian Peppers. They didn't care what he was 'famous' for. They didn't necessarily approve of him being famous (i.e. most of them didn't). But they all cared that wikipedia shoudl stay free. They all cared that no-one, not even someone powerful and important, could remove information that other, not-powerful people had decided was important.

This has nothing to do with Mr Peppers. It has to do with powerful people vs. not-powerful people, censorship vs. freedom, all that stuff. And the Brian Peppers thing is stupid, but the point is not. The point matters. A lot.

Personally, I don't think there should have been a Brian Peppers article on Wikipedia. But I do believe that no-one should be able to take it down.

http://www.wikitruth.info/index.php?title=Uncensored:Brian_Peppers

Much love always, big hug,

Zoe

Opportunity in the commute

A very interesting post on Technology Review: http://bit.ly/faT0h

The basic point: Commuting in 'Asia' (Otherwise known as 'a very large group nations and ethnicities that are more culturally and linguistically diverse than Europe, but anyhow') involves more use of public transportation than in the 'West' (which, as it includes France, the USA, and New Zealand, is geographically everywhere).

Semantics aside, the point is good. Commuting has traditionally been Dead Time. In a car or on public transport, there is limited to no face-to-face socialising. In a car, there is the potential for out-loud noise (e.g. the radio), on transport there is the potential for personal noise (e.g. an ipod). But for Other Things - using the internet - that's different.

In a car, your hands are on the wheel. You can't use the internet. On public transport, your hands are free. You can use the internet.

For public transport users, that's a lot of time that was previously Dead that is now usable. Time that could be used for learning.

There's a lot of reasons why educators should consider creating mobile apps, but for me, the commute is the most compelling. People who can use their hands while commuting can choose to use that time for learning - and that's time that educators should be providing for.

Tools and Toys

I bought a Thing today.

I bought a tripod for my DSLR camera. It is very nice. It has one special feature - you can reset the mount so the camera points directly downwards. That'swhy I bought it. For years, I've been getting more and more interested in macro photography, otherwise known as 'extreme closeups'. My macros are usually of plants, but also (when I have the chance) I take pictures of things that wash up on beaches. I really like things that wash up on beaches. That's why I needed a tripod that can point down.

I take pictures, but they're not exceptionally good (note the lack of a link) and they don't earn me any money. It's for my own fun.

But taking the pictures can't be done properly (handshake is my enemy) without a tripod.

So: is my tripod a tool or a toy?

There's a task that can't be done without a tripod, which is work, but the task itself is play. So - is the object required to achieve the task a tool or a toy?

I'm going with toy, but if my pictures improve, then I may be prepared to upgrade.

What makes a good vocabulary?

My husband Doug and I just got back from an excellent holiday in Catalonia/Catalunya, in the North of Spain (that's where Barcelona is, geography fans!)

The trip was made easier because I Speak Spanish. (Otherwise known as Castellano, the dominant form, one of five indigenous languages spoken in the country and not the one spoken in Catalonia, but I digress.)

We went for a walk through the beautiful Garrotxa national park, which is full of extinct volcanoes. The best one had a chapel - a whole chapel! - right inside the crater.

And that's when I almost stepped on the snake.

(I don't recommend stepping on snakes - it's a bad idea. What's interesting is that you actually jump sideways before you think 'snake!' The reaction is pre-language.)

And that's when I realised I didn't know the Spanish word for 'snake'.

A horrible scenario played out in my head - me getting bitten, Doug calling the ambulance, and me fighting my way through 'it was an animal that makes the sound 'hiss' and is long like a string and bendy' on a call to the emergency services.

The thing is, I had had a complete conversation about local attitudes to Catalonia becomming an independent nation state and Madrid's objections to the idea earlier that day. When I had that conversation, I would happily have said I spoke good Spanish. But I didn't know the word for snake. Because 'snake' is not a word that comes up frequently in conversation. Over the course of the holiday, I identified further holes in my vocabulary, of which a short sample is:

Wrist

Sheet

Hem

Corn

Hair conditioner

Gastroenteritis (don't ask)

...and yes, I've learned them now. The point is this:

Specialised vocabularies are incomplete. To know a language well, you must know the words that come up infrequently - like snake, and wrist, and corn. These words seem basic, because they communicate basic concepts, but they don't come up in day-to-day conversation as much as you may think, and especially not in the language of business (unless, of course, you are in the business of selling corn). It's been a wake-up call for me, and an incentive to improve. I only wish the incentive hadn't involved a poisonous beast.

For the record, Spanish for snake is 'serpiente'.

What teachers do

In all the schools I've worked in, teachers tend to rely on three dominant technologies: the textbook, the photocopier, and the folder. They find content they like in textbooks, photocopy it, hand it out to students, collect it by hand, mark it by hand. If it's good, they put it into a folder so they can find it later. I've worked in schools like this, and I still have several folders full of photocopies.

The teachers also rely on two secondary technologies: scissors and pens. They photocopy pages out of the textbooks, cut out the best bits from the photocopies, scribble on them, photocopy the result, and put them in the folder.

This is not good. In fact, it's bad. The marking is labour intensive, the mechanisms for repurposing are constrained by what fits on an A4 page, and the potential for sharing almost non-existant (unless you lend somebody your folder).

I'm pretty sure that www.english360.com (which I work on) is going to be a fantastic start to fixing this. But I wonder what else is missing.

Schools must be among the last workplaces to run so extensively on paper - what will the trigger be to take them off it?

I have news!

Part one of my news is this: I have a new job!

Part two: It's a really awesome job!

Part three: It's an awesome job working on something awesome!

Part four: It's an awesome job working on something awesome that will help other people to do awesome stuff!

I have taken on a role with www.English360.com. It's a website that provides tools to teachers who teach English to speakers of other languages. And I think it's great.

Here's what it does:

It lets teachers author their own content. You can use it to Make Things. Quizzes and tests to start with, and you can embed whatever you like from wherever you like - English 360 loves your content, wherever you found it.

And then (here's the clever part) you can share what you made.

I know, I know, SCORM stands for shareable content object reference model, and we're all supposed to be reusing packages across different environments (read: ugly old VLEs), and there's merit in all of that but bear with me:

In English 360 you can write your own stuff.

And it's easy.

And it looks nice.

And students like it.

And you can share stuff inside the site instead of pulling it out and putting it in a repository and and then uploading it somewhere else (I'm looking at you, scorm).

And if you like, you can take someone else's work and hack it.

Yup, hacking. For me, this has been the Big Miss in learning technologies. Teachers have always been hackers, no matter what the technology, including paper. I never once went through a chapter of a textbook in highschool - it was always a bit from page 67, then read the photocopied handout, then partner up to do the questions on page 92 followed by the bonus questions on the blackboard (as in the one on the wall at the front). I've never met an educator in my life who doesn't bridle at Being Told What To Teach. Every time we throw a learning resource for teachers into the world that is harder to hack than paper, we let those teachers down. Hacking is valuable, hacking is important, hacking should be encouraged and supported.

'But', I hear you say, 'are you really giving your support to a repository made of 100% user generated material? What about professionally authored content? If you don't have that, how will you ever guarantee any level of quality?'

To which I say: Oh, but we DO have that. We do.

English 360 is chock-full of professionally authored material from Cambridge University Press. It's material that was originally created for paper textbooks. But here's the thing about textbooks: the vast majority of question sets found in them conform to six (only six!) question types, all of which are expressible in XML (just ask the QTI folk, they'll tell you). All that paper content has now been converted for a new lease on life. So English360 has both sides covered: user-generated and professionally-generated content living side by side, happily and in harmony. All of it rateable and shareable and - I must stress - hackable. Isn't that nice?

Naturally, there are also VLE-type functions like timetabling and class management (if you're into that kind of thing) and lots to play with. It's still super-new, so it's not polished up and perfect just yet, but the bone structure is good. And I am so looking forward to helping flesh it all out.

Facebook lite

...So we don't know much about facebook lite just yet, but according to techcrunch:

"...Facebook Lite has nothing to do with Twitter or FriendFeed — at least, not right now. Instead, it was designed to be used in parts of the world where broadband speeds vary and can be expensive, we’re being told by Facebook. Given that the initial testing of it has taken place in India over the past several days, this makes sense."

http://bit.ly/11ZXLg

Lots of places in the world have wretched internet access. For a taster on the troubles of wiring up Africa, for example, read this from Wired.co.uk:

http://bit.ly/XAozK

Short version: in the developing world, the connectivity isn't improving at the same rate that the user base is growing.

So what we have here is a bit of a Mohammed/Mountain situation. What's easier to move? The connectivity, or the sites at the other end of the connectivity? Short term at least, it's the sites.

And do bear in mind that, along with the rich of the developing world, very poor people collectively have a fairly substantial amount of money, so are more commercially viable a target market than you may think.

Here's the point: This is good for people. I assume the market being catered to is rich, but it will benefit poor people too.

Example: consider, just for a moment, refugees.

Consider a woman who has made her way from unsafe African nation A to slightly safer nation B. She got split up from her husband and kids. She doesn't know where they are, or if they're safe. She could easily spend months - or more - looking for them, without even knowing she was going in the right direction.

Access to facebook would change this woman's life.

Of course facebook lite wasn't designed to help displaced people. That doesn't mean it won't, though. I am thrilled about facebook lite, because (ever the optimist, me) it might - might - herald the start of Western web design optimised for use in the developing world. And that would do amazing, amazing things.

Facebook: bravo.

...so here's my idea.

**UPDATE** It's all over. Myself and @dannydavies managed £168 profit for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, all with a couple of hours work. Sweet.

Now that swine flu is underway, my workplace is festooned with these posters:

...which is all well and good, APART FROM tissues are not treated as essential office supplies in my workplace (like they should be), and people are supposed to bring their own. Which they don't. Fair enough, it's a hassle.

Result: No catching, no binning, and very little killing. This in a workplace that has already had several confirmed cases.

Here's what I'm going to do:

1. I'm going to buy 100+ boxes of tissues.

2. I'm going to bring them to work.

3. I'm going to sell them for a donation - anything above cost price.

4. I'm going to give the proceeds to one of our workplace approved charities.

That's it - that's the whole plan.

If you want to play too (and you're in the UK), there's a justgiving page here: www.justgiving.com/tissuefest. (For reference - Just Giving is excellent, it's the only fundraising tool I ever use.)

Standards - a personal perspective.

First: I have a confession to make.

I am a size zero.

That's right, the most Hated dress size on the planet. US zero, UK six. Tiny. Wee. Very, very thin. But probably not as thin as you think. Here's a not-very-attractive pic that should give you an idea of what size zero actually looks like on a person (In this case, a person wearing wetsuit bottoms, but still):

Now, if I didn't mention that I was a size zero, you probably wouldn't guess. Because I don't look that thin, right? Not scary-anorexic-model thin, not gym-mad thin (I eat two hot meals a day and ride a bike), not like a size zero.

Because up until a couple of years ago, I wasn't.

Here's the thing: dress sizes aren't standard. They used to be, though. The first survey of women's body sizes was taken in America between 1949 and 1952 by the then National Bureau of Standards, and it hasn't changed much since then. Unfortunately, a lot has changed since then. Specifically, two things have changed:

Change 1: Women's bodies. Women in the West are now taller, fatter, and have much bigger breasts proportionate to overall bodyfat.

Change 2: Marketing. Specifically, vanity sizing. The principle is simple: if a woman thinks of herself as size UK 14, but fits into a UK 12 skirt in the shop, she feels Really Good About Herself and will be more likely to buy the skirt.

Result: Today, the standards are no longer useful, but in addition, they're being used wrongly. What we have is bad standards being used badly.

...the end result of all this is that I can't actually buy clothes in most shops. I can usually find something in shops marketed at teenagers (thank you, Top Shop), but for adult clothes that you might wear to work? No dice. I have, however, learned to sew - hardly an item in my office wardrobe hasn't been tampered with.

That's the analysis, now for the synthesis.

1. Bad standards are bad for business. I want to spend money on clothes, but can't, because of bad standards. That's money the shops aren't getting.

2. Business assumptions about standards CAN be wrong. There are a lot of women about my size, and none of us can buy clothes. (UK dwellers: have a close look at the next thin woman you see - the odds are good that she will actually look a bit dishevelled. That's probably because her clothes are too big, or badly chosen because options were so few.)

3. Standards applied badly confuse customers, and reduce purchasing. I won't go into nice shops because I'm fairly sure they won't have my size, so it's probably a waste of my time. I might be wrong, but I will never know because the odds are so low I won't bother in the first place. That's more money not spent. And I certainly won't take a punt on online shopping.

These three principles can be applied more widely than you might think, so I'm going to apply them to elearning:

1. A lot of educators are in the market for content (yes, even paid), but if they can't find what they're looking for, they won't buy it.

2. Educators aren't necessarily looking for the things we think they're looking for. There is a long, long tail involved here, and one size most certainly does not fit all.

3. Bad and/or inconsistent standards make things (trousers, content, you name it) hard to find. If we make content difficult to find, educators will give up - and unlike people who need a new shirt, they don't ever have to come back.

Standards matter. They can never be perfect, and applied with unerring uniformity, they can be bad (the woman with a small bust and wide hips will not appreciate the uniform application of standard sizing). But the better any industry can get the standards, the better it will be able to cater to the full breadth of users.

Knowing how: a case study

I spent a week in Cyprus earlier this month, at the International Association for Forced Migration conference ('forced migrant' being more-or-less a word for 'refugees'). I wasn't attending, my husband was - I was more tagging along, being helpful where I could.

The thing to remember here is - the attendants were Very Clever People.

One attendant had an idea for an ongoing discussion group. She floated it, but immediately hit a snag - Geography. Some people are in England, some Australia, some Malaysia, Ghana, you name it. How can you possibly have a discussion group across so many countries? The crew at our table agreed it was a doomed idea.

Me, I was mentally banging my head against the wall and weeping softly.

Long story short - I promised to make them a website where they could talk and share work.

When I got home, I contacted a friend who had made a similar-ish site to find out how he did it. I had a bit of a go on square space, before realising that it wasn't right for the project (actually I don't think it's much good at all, but maybe that's just me). Then I thought of Ning. I had a look, decided it was fit for purpose, and started building. Then I set up a drop.io for document sharing - not an elegant solution, but good enough.

My friend wrote back to recommend Ning, confirming my conclusion that it was the best on offer at the moment (for free, at least.) The whole thing took about an afternoon of my time.

SO:

Could my brilliant friend, who's idea it was, do this?

The first answer is obvious: 'of course she could. It's easy, isn't it? And she is clever.'

And it's true. But I maintain that my brilliant friend could NOT have done this. Not because she isn't clever - she is - or knowledgeable - which she really is. She couldn't have done it because of pre-existing knowledge.

The knowledge required was:

1. You can have private discussion groups online

2. Those groups can be nice to look at

3. They're free

4. There's a good one called Ning

5. Ning is recommended by someone I know whose opinion I trust

...aquiring that knowledge from scratch, even if you were to dedicate a month to it, would be incredibly difficult because you wouldn't know what you were looking for in the first place. Not knowing what to look for would be a deterrent. Not knowing that the thing you needed even existed is more than a deterrent - it's an unjumpable gap.

The group isn't up and running quite yet, as various contributers have been doing inconvenient things like getting married and migrating (I'm looking at you, Alice), but the point remains: it can be done.

And the question also remains: How do we make it so more people know it can be done?

VLEs: problems with the one-stop shop

VLEs. I'm not a fan.

It's taken me a long time to articulate why I dislike them so much, and I'm not finished yet, but here are some initial points:

VLES don't do one thing well. They do two things badly.

Specifically, they do administration and they do teaching/learning. Not the same!

Administrative activities (e.g. creating class lists, tracking attendance, allocating parking spaces) (yes, I've seen a VLE that does that) and learning activities (e.g. collaborating on a projects, research, work submission) have different stakeholders and different management requirements, which, in turn, require different infrastructures.

Administration:

Administration can only be done by designated, authorised people within a known & standard framework - such as the teacher (who is authorised) taking the roll (which is standard). There is a significant disadvantage to the teacher innovating by taking the roll in a different way, or by involving the students in the roll call, or taking the roll differently from all the other teachers. Every teacher - and only teachers - must take the roll the same way for the overall system to work.

Administration is never collaborative. Administrators intrinsically have set roles in a hierarchy. Individual innovation does not help administration.

Teaching and learning:

Good teaching and learning (in my opinion) is all about freeing up the individual. (Isn't that the goal of education? To free the learner? Education creates knowledge in the mind that wasn't there before - it is intrinsically innovative.)

Innovation - by the teacher, by the learner, by the group - is the key deal, and it is supported beautifully by collaborative technologies. We've never had it better for constructivist pedagogy. The sharing, swapping, and creation of new knowledge - all of this can be done, and is done, in social network environments, both online and in the physical world.

But not in VLEs.

One round peg, one square peg, one round hole

Both administration and pedagogy are necessary in schools. They are also completely different in what infrastructure they require. This (in my opinion) has been the great failing of VLEs - they all try to squeeze the round pedagogy peg into the square administration hole.

It hasn't worked very well. Trying to coax collaboration in what is effectively an administrative environment, without the porous walls that social media thrives on, hasn't worked. The 'walled garden' of the VLE is just not as fertile as the juicy jungle outside, and not enough seeds blow in on the wind.

That's why I'm always cautious of the 'one-stop-shop' approach in education - administration and pedagogy are very, very different shops. It's like having a fishmongers and a haberdashers sharing the same store - no discernible upsides, but a LOT of downsides (stinky fabric springs to mind).

The limits of the one-stop-shop: real world examples

On that note, a lot of good lessons for e-business can be found in 'real-world' business. For example: In the real world, there is a sliding scale between quality of product and specificity of store. Clothes provides a good example:

Tesco: sells everything from food to electronics, and all clothes from underwear to fancy dresses. Has very low quality clothes.

H & M: sells men's and women's clothes for many occasions together, has medium quality clothes.

Savile Row tailor: sells only men's clothes, and of that, only suits, has extremely high quality clothes.

The higher the specificity, the higher the quality.

...the point that is interesting here is not that Tesco sells bad clothes, but that there is no example of a Tesco-like sells-lots-of-different-things store that sells very high-quality clothes. (Harrods may be the exception here, but theirs is a very old business model that I don't believe anyone is now trying to reproduce.)

An andecdote

Way Back When I was still in schools, I started a project with some Australian year 8 students. I got them all to write blogs. The goal was to teach them some persuasive writing skills, how to 'play nicely' online, and just a little dash of html.

Two weeks in, an extra blog popped up - one of the kids in the next class had joined in because he thought it looked fun.

I won't be impressed by any VLE until it can let it's own members do the same.

Person names as unique ids (again)

Yesterday, I finally changed my twitter name.

I really liked my old one. I liked being 'coelacanthro'. I thought it was super clever - 'coelacanth' being a super impressive dinosaur fish, which tied in nicely with 'anthro' for person. Additionally, it was extremely unlikely that anyone else would use it in another environment. But:

- It's hard to spell (which makes it hard to remember)

- It's hard to pronounce (which makes it hard to mention in non-text environments)

- It's got a lot of letters in it (which makes it inconvenient to retweet)

Which cumulatively means: it's no good.

So I had to choose a replacement. There are two options here: Your actual name, and Not. My actual name is Zoe Rose. For my professional reputation, I would love to be Zoe Rose, or zoerose at least. But Zoe Rose is problematic:

- There's a surprisingly large number of people called Zoe Rose

- There's a surprisingly large number of people who claim to be called Zoe Rose

- There's a pornographic actress who claims to be called Zoe Rose

'Zoe Rose' is non-unique. It's taken in just about every social media environment, and it's not immediately evident which Zoe Rose I am. And I would just HATE to ever be confused with the pornographic one, by anyone. It seems that to maintain my professional reputation, I have to make the decidedly unprofessional leap to using not-my-name.

So, I've chosen 'memexer', in conformance with this blog and in homage to Vannevar Bush (See sidebar). The next question is - will I be able to use it in all my social media environments? Should I? Will it have enough longevity?

Will it still look even vaguely professional in five years time? If not, will we have found a better solution by then?

(It may well be moot, anyhow - when I changed my name, twitter locked me out of my account. Time will tell if I ever get it back...)

Dude, what?

So. A strange thing happened to me on the twitter today.

I got a dm from a friend, a man who I've met & gone drinking with in real life. A nice man. A man who has given me every impression of being someone who knows how to spell. A man who may not be responsible for the below, and therefore, will not be named here. (Yet.)

Here's a non-verbatim (I'll get to that) transcript of the conversation, over the course of twenty minutes or so:

him: u r hot :p

me: dude, what?

him: dude?! duuuuuuude!?!?

me: Don't mean to sound stroppy, and I may be missing the joke, but you realise you're talking to a married lady, right?

No response.

THEN something weird happened.

I went to check my dms, and 'u r hot :p' wasn't there. Creepy. So I dm'ed him:

me: how did you retract that dm?

him: ?!?!?!?

me: I had a dm from you that said 'u r hot :p', and now it's gone

...and then it got weirder again. All his dms disappeared. That was disconcerting, but worse, MINE to HIM disappeared as well!

By this point I was assuming that someone had hacked my/his account, or both, and that I probably had a new tweet-eating, emoticon-based virus. (That's why it's not verbatim - the entire record of conversation has been wiped). But no! No, it's weirder than that. My colleague and I experimented, and here is what we found out:

If you dm someone, and then delete it, it disappears from both your streams

If someone dms you, and you delete it, it disappears from both your streams

Madness!

Call me crazy, but I don't like the idea of having my work wiped at someone else's whim. That's peanuts, though, compared to the scary prospect of the bullying that this could enable. You could send as vicious a message as you could fit in 140, and remove it before trouble happened.

So all - if you (or more importantly, your kids) ever get an unwelcome dm that you want to have on the record, screenshot it.

And as for you, Mr :p, I'm going to go on ahead and give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm assuming that you left your account open and someone with an aversion to vowels and a fondness for punctuation used it to play silly buggers. I could be wrong. You could be a jerk.

But I really, really hope not.

**UPDATE** No, it wasn't him - it was a prankster. Thank goodness for that.

A true story

...So, I was sitting at the pub reading a book, when I couldn't help overhearing the conversation at the table next to mine.

(in other words: I was eavesdropping.)

Three people, in their twenties, were busily discussing a Project - one was talking about flash, another, nerve endings and neural paths.

I couldn't help myself. I turned around and asked - 'what are you talking about?'

One - a young doctor - told me that he'd had an idea. He'd spent a lot of time playing GeoQuest on facebook (disclosure: I love that game) and had discovered, to his surprise, that he'd developed a lot of geography knowledge by doing so. That set him thinking - 'anatomy is hard, games are fun, you learn from games, so why not teach anatomy with a game?' 

With no knowledge of the industry, the technical standards or anything else, this industrious group of clever young people were planning to create their own elearning resources for their peers. I could have cried, it was so touching. 

I gave them some hints, and left them with my email in case they wanted a hand. But the thing that got to me was this: that elearning made enough sense to these folk that they were willing to draw on their expertise, have a go, and make some themselves.

I salute them, and I hope to see many more.

I made a wonderful discovery yesterday.

I was cycling home after some volunteer work at a local primary school (nb: my day usually doesn't resemble Mary Poppins' quite so closely) when I accidentally found a new aquarium store: http://www.cambridgecoraltech.co.uk/.

I have dreamed of a store like this. Never thought I'd find one.

They sell coral. They sell lovely normal tropical fish. They also sell banded coral shrimp, lionfish, seahorses, pipefish, stonefish (OH MY GOD), stingrays (OH WOW) and - are we ready? SEA JELLIES.

Sea jellies! No way.

Sea jellies are super-hard to keep. They need constantly moving water and very specific foods. (The jellies on sale are apparently quite easy, becuase they like to lie upside down on their bells with their tentacles floating upwards. Nature, eh?)

Now why didn't I find this store before?

Because the browse mechanism that lead me to it was 'cycling down the right street'.

I've been intrigued for a while now by how bad conventional search is for finding local businesses. Location specificity in search is being improved by google maps, but there's a long way to go.

What excites me about improvements to location based search is this: That it will have a huge, and positive, impact of local small business. If a quick search can reveal that there is a specialist alternative to B&Q or homebase nearby, then that is more business that the specialist can potentially get, which in turn will lead to more specialists.

I could be wrong. But I hope that, if location based search gets really good, we could have a small-business renaissance. And wouldn't that be nice?

Ambiently

I quite like this.

In a conventional, keyword based search engine (I'm looking at you, Google) there's a lot of guess-work involved. It works like this:

• There is a 'thing' out there in the world that can be described many ways using 'words'. (And yes, this remains true when the 'thing' is made of 'words', as the majority of open-web 'things' are.)
• There is the author of a website. She describes her 'things' using certain 'words'.
• There is a user. She must guess which 'words' the author used to describe the 'thing'.

For top-level concepts, that works fine. Take the educational content-packaging standard called 'SCORM'. Search using word SCORM, and you'll find a bunch of sites about SCORM. So far so good.

But if your search is more specific, it gets tricky. Let's say the user has a SCORM package and she'd like a free piece of software to test it for compliance to the SCORM 2004 specification. Now she has to guess words: 'free' 'compliance' 'SCORM' '2004' (bearing in mind that google uses whitespace as a delimiter - i.e. a way of breaking up English into meaningful chunks). Lots of results, but no testing tool! So she guesses again. And again. And again.

Ambiently provides a simple, but potentially very poweful, change. Via a button on the toolbar, it will present the user with 'related websites'. Instead the user guessing keywords, ambiently (I'm guessing based on my own limited trials, here) uses the site you're currently in as keywords. Start in the almost-right-place, and it will show you what's close. No guessing.

It's a small change. It's not semantic (my standard test of semantic value - 'piracy' - returned as much on copyright as it did on high seas crime). You won't see substantially different results from google. But I suspect that for intricate and/or highly specific searches, it will prove extremely useful.

Also - it brands itself as a 'discovery' engine, rather than a 'search' engine. Full props to that - it's about time we stopped using 'search' as a catch-all term for discovery. 'Search' implies that you already know exactly what you're looking for, denying the value of serendipitous discovery. Sure, it's semantics, but semantics are the bread and butter of content discovery!

www.ambiently.com

...and the answer to the question is: there is an excellent free SCORM compliance tool at www.scorm.com. If you use SCORM, this site is invaluable.

Unique identifiers that aren't

...This has been bothering me for some time.

Here are my top two contenders for the most irritating 'unique identifiers that aren't'. By that I mean: terms that should refer to only one entity within a range of entities, but don't. 

If you search for 'Apple' on the open web (e.g. in Google), then yes, you will get a combination of fruit and tech. That's annoying, but the two entity sets - 'fruit' and 'tech' - are fundamentally different. If you move to an environment that serves a specific entity set - a supermarket online service, or cNet - that if you search 'apple' you'll get the relevant entity.

But what if there were two tech companies called 'Apple'? Entities with the same name in the same entity set? Well, of course, there are. Here are my least favourite:

1. Place names. 

I live in a town called 'Cambridge'. It is in the UK. There is also a town called 'Cambridge' in Massachusetts, USA. More annoyingly, they both have prestigious universities (in the US, Harvard). Searches on the open web usually return both.

It's not a big problem for me, but I have undying sympathy for the good people of Paris, Texas, and Melbourne, Florida. (The Paris people especially - they must curse that movie).

Still - country filters usually sort this one out without much fuss. Unlike...

2. People names.

My name is Zoe Rose.  A google search for "Zoe Rose" (mini google hack: double quotes tell the engine to search for the words as a string, i.e. disallowing the whitespace delimiter) will return, in reverse order:

• Style A to Zoe by Rachel Zoe, Rose Apoda Apodaca by Little...
• Zoe Rose Mogan Jennings
• Zoe Rose - London | Facebook
• Motel @ Topshop Urban Outfitters Zoe Rose Dress M 10 12 on eBay
• Zoe Rose Designs - Hereford textile artist creating handmade...
• Video result: Piedemont High School Senior Speaker Zoe Rose
• bebo.com - Profile from Zoe Rose.
• bebo.com - Profile from Zoe Rose

aaaaand, my personal favourite, result number one:

• Zoe Rose - Actress. World Sex Tour 23: England. Visit IMDn for photos, filmography...
  

That's right. A porn star stole my name. 

You have to get to the third page before 'Zoe Rose' meaning me comes up at all - and the reference is way out of date. While it's nice to have some privacy, there is something cringeworthy about being outranked by a dress. 

So let's disect. My unique identifier is muddled up with: 

• People who have part of my name - google can't differentiate between 'Rose' as middle name and 'Rose' as surname
• Inadvertent co-location of 'Zoe' and 'Rose', due to rose being a proper noun as well as a name
• People who legitimately have the same name as me (fair enough)
• Entities that aren't people at all (the dress)
• A porn star who I really, really wish had picked a different pseudonym

I can't think of a solution to this one. But I really hope someone else does - and soon.

Is social media Epicurean?

Epicurus. What an excellent philosopher.

Epicurus is mostly associated now with the word 'Epicure', a person who enjoys their food and drink with more sophistication than the rest of us oiks (disclosure: I used to be a committee member on a wine tasting society, so sue me). Interestingly, Epicurus wasn't into food and drink at all - he mostly ate cheese and bread. But he was interested in the good life, and as society turned to sensory pleasure as a measure of the good life, his legacy got a little twisted. 

Let's start in my favourite place - the opening paragraph of a wikipedia article!

For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by aponia, the absence of pain and fear, and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and bad, that death is the end of the body and the soul and should therefore not be feared, that the gods do not reward or punish humans, that the universe is infinite and eternal, and that events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus

You can't help but like him, can you? (He was also an early advocate for empirical observation as the foundation for science and thusly truth - kudos, Epicurus.)

When Epicurus talked about being surrounded by friends, he meant just that - all the friends, all of the time. He lived in what we would now see as a commune. Happiness, he figured, was not in the seeking of anything - be it power, money, or reward after death. It was in living well, not sometimes but always. And part of that was having good people around you. All the time.

Social networking gets a bad rap for being plagued with narcissists and for creating false connections between people, for being full of people whose only interest is in having as many names connected to their own as possible. That hasn't been my experience at all. The great mass of people I know and observe in social networking environments are friends with their friends. Facebook you populate with friends you've met, twitter with friends you have and haven't, and myspace... well, maybe myspace isn't a good example. But what you wind up with is the Epicurean dream - a life surrounded by your friends. All the friends, all the time.

Maybe that's not so bad - or new - a thing.

Karl Popper, lost genius of business

(Yes, fellow philosophy students, I know that title is cheeky.)

I can go on for hours about the brilliance of Karl Popper. In a nutshell - after Einstein broke Newtonian physics, thereby effectively breaking SCIENCE, Popper was the guy kneeling on the floor, picking up the bits and saying 'don't worry, it's still good...'

Among the insights was this unbelievably important gem:

Science can't prove anything. It can only disprove things.

Consider the famous black swan example:

A scientist spends her life observing swans. She observes that all the swans she has ever seen are white. Based on this empirical evidence, she posits a theory that all swans are white. This theory is good, solid, SCIENCE.

One day she travels to Australia, and sees - GASP! - a black swan.

Her theory is disproven. But that doesn't mean it wasn't science when she thought of it. Now she can posit a new theory: Swans can be white or black. And again, the new theory is science.

You cannot prove science. You can only disprove it. That is what makes science science. 

Isn't that terrific?

So - the connection to business models, especially as relates to the business of distributing content on the internet. As far as e-business models go, we have seen a lot of black swans. And green, and blue, and every other colour. 

There have been a hundreds of different theories about how to make money from content on the internet, and one by one, they have pretty much all been disproven. 

The plaguing question - 'how do I make money from content?' has not been answered. Content producers are, rightly, very worried. But for every disproved theory, we edge closer and closer to a theory that works.

The gaping flaw here is, of course, that there might not actually be a way to make proper money from content on the internet. And even once some good, viable ways are found, they are always open to being disproved. But if there is a way to do it, the only way we're going to find out is by observing, hypothesising, and testing, for as long as it takes.  

Or until bankruptcy, whichever comes first. 

Yay homographs!

Natural Language Processing - it's a minefield. The NLP facet that every google user knows about (even if they might not know the technical name) is the HOMOGRAPH. That's a word that is spelt the same way as another word with a different meaning. 

Not a Homonym.

A homonym is a word that has the same spelling and the same pronunciation as another word witha different meaning - like 'left', 'right', 'current', or 'set' ('set' is the all time winner with 21 discrete meanings in the OED!) Homographs only need to have the same spelling. Computers, after all, aren't fussed with pronunciation.

(For reference, words that have the same pronunciation but different meanings are homophones, but don't concern NLP). 

Here's a list of homographs, and it's longer than you might think:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_homographs

Add in the acronyms of companies, which are so prevalent on the internet, and you have a swamp. 

This is why I'm a fan of the semantic web. Until there's a reliable way for a machine to tell the difference between 'bear' and 'bear', which I don't think there ever will be (even a person requires detailed context), RDF will be the best we have.

TERM	Meaning	Spelling	Pronunciation
Homonym	Different	Same	Same
Homograph	Different	Same	Different
Homophone	Different	Different	Same
Heteronym	Different	Same	Different
Polyseme	Multiple meanings	Same	Same or Different
Capitonym	Different	Different if capital first letter	Different

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym

My favourite will always be the capitonym. From polish to Polish and march to March is a lovely semantic jump!

My Bad

Like a lot of people, I have been loving twitter. LOVING it. 

Because of twitter, I've stopped using my RSS feed, stopped googling for news, stopped doing lots of things. 

On twitter, I mostly contribute links by re-tweeting - passing on other people's tweets to my followers. 

But recently, this has felt a little... weak. Because one of the OTHER things I've stopped doing is blogging.

That is to say, while I am doing a great job of passing on other people's ideas, I'm not creating - or contributing  - any of my own.

So - a new direction. I've thought about what I appreciate in a blog post, and here's what I've come up with:

• Posts that are brief
• Posts that contain new ideas
• Posts that synthesise broad ideas and patterns
  
• Posts that link to sources
• Posts that have a sense of humour

So that is what I'll try to do. Post regularly, briefly (but in more than 140 characters!), and hopefully, provide something valuable.  

Ada Lovelace Day - I love Lucy!

**This was originally posted a month ago, but, in keeping with the spirit of the day, here it is again!**

As documented at http://findingada.com/:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.All you need to do is sign the pledge, pick your tech heroine and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about - everyone is invited. To help us keep track of the conversation about Ada Lovelace Day ahead of the event, and to pull together everything on the day, please use these tags:AdaLovelaceDay09 for Delicious, Technorati etc. It’s long, but clear.#ALD09 for Twitter hashtags.

I already know who my tech heroine is, and while I'll write this again on the day, I'm happy to nominate... LUCILLE BALL!! No, I'm not joking.Lucille Ball is one of the great unrecognised media figures of our time. Media is a technology, and technology is increasingly a medium, so why not?

Amazingnesses include:

1. Lucille Ball invented the repeat. And if you think that's a so-so achievement, get yourself a copy of 'Everything Bad is Good for You' (underrated book imho) and get yourself some learning about the power of repeatability. The more times a consumer can watch a show, the more potentially profitable it can be over time, and the greater incentive there is for producers to improve the quality. DVD box sets, people. And yes, I am saying Lucille Ball is responsible for the Sopranos.

2. Lucille Ball opened people's minds & broke down prejudices. Desi Arnaz (Ricky) was Cuban. And this was the 50s. (And yes they were actually married, but did divorce after 20 years or so.)

3. Lucille Ball was the first female head of a TV production company (DesiLu).

4. Lucille Ball produced Star Trek. HA! Bet you didn't know that last one, did you? Totally true, and she gets the credit for Mission: Impossible, too.

educational publishing - some predictions

A thought provoking set of ideas from MIT's Sarah Scrafford, as found here: 

http://amps-tools.mit.edu/tomprofblog/archives/2009/03/927_imminent_ch.html#more

What I like about Sarah's approach is that she avoids some of the more Utopian, airy/fairy leanings of typical digital-ed future predictions, and gets down to specifics. She's talking specifically about higher ed publishing, but many of the ideas are further reaching. 

I recommend reading the whole thing, because I'm only going to report on points of personal interest here (ie the following is not representative of the original). 

Highlights include: 

* Data in the digital format requires the use of additional technology to access, read and modify. This technology may not be universally available due to constraints like cost, and even if available, may not be used by everyone because of training gaps and lack of accessibility.

Now why is that interesting? Because it shows a reversal of what publishers want: We want paid-for content distributed on free technologies that everyone understands. The technology of 'how to make a book' is basically free - you get some bits of paper and bung them together. And everyone knows how to use a book (apart, of course, from this dude). We've never expected people to pay for paper - we expect them to pay for what's written on it, i.e. the content. 

So, the way things are going is exactly the opposite of our business model. 

Nuts. 

Highlight 2: 

* Lack of publishing format standards hinder the process of aggregating content from various sources, collating it and re-publishing only what you need.

Absolutely. Especially re. 'aggregation' - but I have a post on this ready for next week, so I won't extrapolate now. I would add, though, that as well as aggregating between sources we also need standards for aggregation within sources. Individual chapters of books, individual articles in journals, series of monographs... it's a long list that requires an extensible solution.  

Highlight 3:

* Digital publishers must cope with opposition and resentment from the print industry which will certainly not relish the prospect of being driven out of business.

Now here I disagree, but only because this is a false dichotomy. The print publishers are all scrambling to become digital publishers, but no-one - even the exclusively-digital - has got a grip on how to long-term derive revenue from content yet. (Yet.)

Sarah goes on to identify benefits of going digital:

* The ability to modify content or just a part of it easily and at a considerably low cost. The same exercise with traditional books is a time consuming and costly affair.

In the case of academic textbooks, updated versions are where a significant fraction of income comes from - digital versioning may yet cost publishers more than it saves.

* Teachers can put together customized lessons depending on what they think their students are interested in rather than being forced to rely on one or two books alone.

This is 100% true if the teachers can find the content. That hurdle, unfortunately, is yet to be jumped (and is why I bang on about metadata & searchability all my life). 

* Digital content takes up a fraction of the storage space that printed matter does, thus freeing up shelves and shelves of space.

And did we mention the dead trees? (NB counterpoint: All English repository libraries still keep books. Why? Because paper is still the most reliable technology available. Floppy disks from ten years ago are obsolete, but books from five hundred years ago still work just fine. Digital longevity - in the 'centuries' context - is still a Great Unknown.)

* There's no need to carry around books when you're travelling from place to place. If it's online, all you need is access to a computer and a fast Internet connection.

No... you also need server space. You need the cloud. You also need a particularly good bit of librarian software to find what you need (yes, even if you've found it before). And as the wonderful Bruce Sterling said (see 'patterns and collapse' on this blog + http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2009/03/what-bruce-ster.html), you can't make a platform out of the cloud. Platforms are solid - clouds aren't.  

That's my two cents. But if you've made it this far, do yourself a favour and read the original as well.

worst flight EVER

Far be it for me to use a blog to whinge, BUT:

I just flew Iberia.

The flight from Heathrow? It was supposed to leave at 3.25. We boarded at 3.50. What time was take-off? 5.30.

Got to Madrid an hour late to get my connecting flight to Vigo. But that turned out to be OK - the flight after my flight was over an hour late, so I got that instead. There was no-one to ask if this was OK; I tried to ask a lady steward, who told me (in Spanish) 'I'm counting' and proceeded to count something, and when I asked again, told me 'can't you see I'm working?'

It was great when I finally got to Vigo, though - a little after eleven pm. A very nice lady looked after me, and gave me a special package of treats. Here are some pictures of my special treat pack. Can you guess what type of treats they are?

 

They're treats for people whose luggage has been lost.

(And yes, that is a pair of disposable underwear.)