...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.