One word at a time, Michael Birch, former co-founder of Bebo, has been working on a new project to change the way we look at defining words. Wordia allows you and a host of rather entertaining and famous people to take the HarperCollins definition of the word and attach its meaning to you in the form of a quick YouTube-powered video.
Delightfully simple, potentially powerful, Birch and his co-producers understand the importance of a good story to find and remember the meaning of something new. Amongst my faves has to be Quentin Blake's deeper understanding than most of illustration. Top class.
So you've done your YouTube anthropology class, you now need to spend a bit of time brushing up on history's internet memes with these delightful, entertaining and "was it really that long ago?" moments. A nice way to start rounding off the year...
While still at Learning and Teaching Scotland I had hoped the national schools intranet, Glow, might help highlight an amazing story of heroism, and encourage Scotland's young people to follow, question and work around the adventures of solo skipper Rich Wilson as he battles alone around the world in his yacht in the Vendée Globe race. Alas, nothing seems to have arisen from the potential.
However, the social web being as simple to use as it is, even when you're balancing a sat phone to send text messages as you nurse a broken rib, Rich, on the recommendation of superb Boston-based teacher and BLC-buddy Lorraine Leo, has taken the initiative with his SitesAlive colleagues and is now Tweeting very regularly as he sails alone through the dark waters of the Southern seas this Christmas. His latest messages read:
Had
an albatross crash land on the boat. Not sure which of us was more
surprised. It struggled a bit to take off, but it finally flew away. about 1 hour ago from mobile web |
Have 35-40 kt winds for foreseeable future. Making good time if boat & skipper can sustain tension of rocketing down waves. 10:33 PM Dec 21st from web |
Harrowing sea conditions. With just mainsail, boat is less stable directionally than if we had a jib up front. 6:53 PM Dec 21st from web |
Hammered
yet again, big seas, breaking, barograph descended, then steadied as
front came through with gradual windshift, not sudden. 6:51 PM Dec 21st from web |
Had albatross around the boat today. They are amazingly large and also serene birds. 4:15 AM Dec 20th from web |
Past
the Heard Islands. Saw Iridium satellite fly fast overhead tonight
among the bright stars, with its solar panels reflecting sunlight. 4:11 AM Dec 20th from web |
Had a nice chat with Jonny Malbon on the Iridium last night. Good to talk, especially with what happened to Yann yesterday. 12:30 AM Dec 20th from web |
Off the Kerguelen Plateau at last, seas much smoother. 8:22 PM Dec 19th from mobile web |
I am devastated to hear of Yann Elies broken leg. He's a great sailor and a kind man. 2:47 AM Dec 19th from web |
Contact with the 'outside world' during this time must mean so much, so I'd like to encourage you all to wish him well, add him as a contact for the duration of the final half of this race and be amazed at what a former maths teacher, close to retirement, is able to achieve.
When I helped start the educators' unconference, TeachMeet, back in 2005 it was to copy the mantra of my old school magazine (for pupils, by pupils) for a group of people who had often felt disenfranchised by the technocratic, bureaucratic jargon of Central Office HQ: it's for teachers, by teachers. Thus, it would be free (as in beer) and free (as in speech).
I was concerned when I saw earlier this week that the company behind BETT, the big January trade show in London, were charging nearly £14 a head for those who happened to find out about TeachMeet09 through their site, especially since the wiki, where all the discussion, sponsorship and action happens, is easy to use and, importantly, free.
Well, a quick email to the trade exhibition organisers this morning with the highest levels of diplomacy in evidence ("I'm sure this is merely an administrative error, but really...") has led to the removal of the charge and a refund to all those who have paid it already. It would be nice to hear from some of those folk here to be reassured that this has indeed happened.
With new commitments I'll not be able to join in the love, larks and music of January's "learning experience" but wish all those helping to bring the event together the very best. Enjoy creating some further, much-needed change in the way our kids learn.
In about five minutes the PR machine is likely to kick in as Alexandra Burke wins the X Factor. But it's amazing to see how little her online profile has been managed over the past twelve weeks of finals live every Saturday night on the telly box.
Her Facebook profile is currently her real one, with some 25 friends, one of whom is fellow contestant Laura White. It's a far cry from the huge number of fan sites that appear when one searches boy band competition JLS's Marvin. It's also far from what things will be like later this week once the security, PR and superstar status apparatus kicks in.
In other news, I'm delighted Alex has won, netting me loads of dosh (virtual dosh, that is) on Hubdub.com, a wee Edinburgh-based site making waves across the entertainment and news worlds at the moment. On the other hand, condolences to JLS, whose member Marvin is close to the hearts (and stomachs) of us at Channel 4 - his dad is the catering manager.
So what's the conclusion of all this? Well, social media can't trump pure talent, and tools and platforms don't make up for creativity and genius.
Cross-posted at 38minutes
Pic of Alexandra Burke
It's that time of year, where the big annual learning log gets taken out, and I can see whether I did what I set out to do, and work out what lies ahead. The first part of this process is easiest, and is often the part that leaves the most memories of good times had and new friends made: where have I been this year and how much carbon do I have to pay for before the taxman gets his hands on the rest?
I was on at the back of the plane last week, seat 23C offering the most legroom and proximity to the kitchens, and had trouble explaining why, as a Gold Card holder, I was stuck in the back with my breakfast panini instead of tucking into the English breakfast out front. Having quickly totted up the first learning log of 2008 - travel - I can see why a little better. In 2008 I've traveled over a third more, totaling some 81,887 miles, compared to just of 50,000 miles last year.
This is worrying. In an age where technology should be eliminating the need for travel I think one can come to only one conclusion: it's making some of us travel far more. The big carbon trips this year were to the States, India and China. The new regular Monday commute to London and back in a day is also beginning to make a bite into my carbon footprint, which this year on work trips alone is hitting above 17,000 kg.
But thankfully, in the new job, that footprint should fall to a quarter of what is has been this year at worst. I'm looking forward to more time in my own bed, my own home. My family might not be joining me in meeting some extraordinary people in some memorable places, but we'll be OK. And the planet we leave behind will be a few tons of CO2 better off for it.
In a talk not dissimilar to his spiel at the Scottish Learning Festival in 2005, Sir Ken Robinson explains how creativity is at the heart of change. Thanks to Kristian for the tip of the hat.
People sometimes ask why one might 'waste' one's time sitting on Advisory Boards, especially those of conferences. One reason I like it is that you can suggest that you'd like to hear someone like, say, Clay Shirky and, six months later, you've got him. Clay speaks today at Online Information Conference in London.
As well as formal groups around certain types of photography on Flickr (like this HDR group for beginners) there are the more impromptu adhoc communities that form around just one photo. It means that whereas destination sites' half-lives were relatively short, the half-life of a "insta-community" photograph like this becomes very much longer. Flickr, in this case, is an organisation that has created more by doing less - less intervention, less 'management' of community, less structure around debate.
How much does the individual have to give up to get to the action. Sharing is easiest, collaboration is harder and collective action hardest.
Sharing
Bronze Beta is the bulletin board for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's an old skool site/forum based around Buffy. It has one page, and a form in which you put your latest views on Buffy. When the TV co wanted to disband it, or rebrand it the community cried out. "No! Don't give us features. Don't make it different. Above all, don't close it down." The conversations there continue today, well beyond the last episode of Buffy was made.
10 years ago, as Clay helped newspapers move out of Wapping into the new glitz of Canary Wharf, he was concerned with which content management system to get them. Had he told them (had he known) that weblogs being written by geeks in the Valley were going to be harbouring more content than any newspaper could manage, no-one would have believed him.
What makes Bronze Beta work is that it's got a featureless front end, but a very highly developed and complex set of rules of engagement. Fewer features make it easier for the users to share.
Collaboration
The Wikipedia page on Doctor Who has been edited almost 9000 times by over 3000 people. It would be logical (but wrong) to assume that the average is 2.67 edits per person. However, 2200 people only made one edit once, and then moved on. They are not "part of" a community. User Khaosworks, on the other hand, has edited that page nearly 1000 times all on his own. In fact, every article that this user has touched has been on Doctor Who.
This blows up the assumption of an 'average user'. Trying to plan this kind of interaction and collaboration in advance is near impossible to sell to a boss: there's going to be this tiny, unscalable group of users who'll just come to it, unpaid, who you don't know yet, who'll create the product. It really is a case of "in collaboration we trust". We trust it because the long tail type graph of collaboration that Clay refers to is more or less a signature of online collaboration.
Collective action
Getting people to do something is the most difficult thing to do. People tend to do it themselves, of their own accord, when the motivation to do so is more tangible. Cue the HSBC fiasco of last year, when a bank changed its mind on giving students free overdraft and thought instead of charging them £140 for the priviledge. HSBC were banking on the fact that it is tricky to move money from one account to another. They were also banking on the fact that it's hard for students, during a summer holiday, to coordinate action.
Cue Facebook.
When one student set up his Facebook group to campaign against this change, when one student made that effort, it became much easier for people to become activists, just by clicking "Join Group". 4500 members later, with a threat of the whole bunch marching onto the Canary Wharf headquarters, the bank relented.
Thinking is for Doing
Brains are not there to think in abstracts, but to help us do something. Publishing is for acting. Publishing is for doing. It's not just a source of information or a destination site. It's a place where action begins. It's not the Daily Telegraph telling people that HSBC changed the deal. It's Facebook offering a platform to provide that information and then do something about it.
Flashmobs, whose means of collective action I discussed in my recent Cisco paper, are yet another example of technology acting as an enabler to bring people together to act - against dictatorship, for example.
Broadcasters' challenge is technological and economical
The technology that allows us to broadcast has been limited in allowing us to create groups and community. Networks have been limited at doing what broadcasters have done, which is separate out the producer and viewer and participant of content. The internet has given birth to this many-to-many communication, but broadcasters have perhaps been stuck in the mentality of Guttenburg economics: we have to lay out some cash up front before we know if something is going to be successful, therefore the publisher only picks the things that (s)he thinks will make back that upfront. The costs are high and upfront so the risk is mitigated by the filter being placed on the side of the publisher.
When you're not a publisher relying on cash to sell your product or your news, then you can afford to report on what you want, and the readership can simply "put up or shut up". So when a young blogger in Thailand reports on the military coup, before going back to the trivia that she enjoys normally writing about, she receives, as if she were a broadcaster, complaints that her coverage is not in depth enough. She retorts; she's not a pubisher, she doesn't need to please the audience, the audience can come or go and get what they're given. This is a liberation from the shackles of Guttenburg economics that new technologies afford us. It's why blogging is not journalism; a journalist is professionally obliged to stick with the story.
Pro-active protest
Social media has now allowed people to take the initiative in saving their favourite TV shows before the TV show even airs. They have, in fact, created their own crowdsourced marketing department, emailing and advising the TV show on what they have to do to get more people to watch it and make the show such a success it can't be dropped.
The old separations are dead
I got this one quite quickly when I started working for Channel 4 and had to engage with taxi drivers who picked me up on account:
Taxi Driver: So you work for Channel 4?
Me: Yes
TD: What programmes do you make then?
Me: We don't actually make programmes. Other people do that. We just pay them to. But actually, I don't make TV anyway.
TD: What do you do then?
Me: I make websites and cool stuff for mobile phones and games consoles.
TD: Like the ones I see advertised on the TV shows?
Me: No, they're just going to be out there. You'll find them if they're meant for you.
TD: Oh... What's Channel 4 doing that for?
Me: Well, the boundaries matter less nowadays... (at this point, I gain 20 minutes of peace in the taxi.)
All the walls have fallen around the world of information. There are horizons but no barriers. What's the next good thing to do? The answer is likely to be: explore. Try several things at once. If someone has a million pound idea for exploiting the social web, then send them out for a long walk and lock the door behind them. Get them to come up with ten of £100,000 ideas or 100s of £10,000 ideas.
The convening power of traditional media
That, my dears, is a big part of what 4iP is about. 4iP has the potential to be the convener of great ideas, and convene groups that ought to be talking to one another.
With 38minutes we're starting to do just that, having convened a space but given it over entirely to those who want to meet to talk about where they take their design, gaming, coding or new media business in this new(ish) age of t'interweb. Where previously these groups didn't talk, in less than two months we've convened nearly 500 of Scotland and Northern Ireland's top talent from four large sectors who until now rarely spoke about collaborating on projects. But it's happening thanks to the love, sweat, tears and effort of those 500 people, not really 4iP. Just having that shared situational awareness of who's doing what and how you might be able to help make it better is worth its weight in gold.
In the first half of this year I worked with Alas Media, the collective of former students of Marco Torres in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, to produce a year-long podcast series to excite, entertain and educate learners of Spanish. We wanted to explore what it means to be a Latino in modern America, something most textbooks this side of the pond tend to ignore.
Learning and Teaching Scotland have recently started to release the weekly podcast in the iTunes storethrough RSS, as well as on the LTS site. These are some of the best video materials produced for any educational institution or department that I have ever seen, from a point of view of content, context and quality of storytelling.
The result is a series of 17 short movies, beautifully produced by Rosa, Miguel, Eli and Ernesto, which describe the struggles of migrating over two countries on foot to find the American dream, the subsequent problems of trying to integrate while maintaining one's culture, what it means to Hispanic in the States in the first decade of the millennium, what it's like to manage those relationships with your traditionalist family while trying to be an American teen.
The episodes see some progression throughout the year, and are designed for learners with some competence already, from intermediate through to advanced levels.
Have a look at one or two of them, or subscribe so that you never miss an episode. You might be a learner of Spanish or you might be keen to see how these digital stories are being told. Or, like me, you might just be fascinated by these personal stories of joy, sadness, struggle, identity and love
...Well, thinking about transforming education anyway. GETIdeas is Cisco's latest attempt to engage education leaders around the world in some meaningful debate by having them publish their own blogs, and comment on those of others, as well as accessing tons of learning debate and content. I can see the appeal for those who haven't made the plunge into the online debates yet, within the relatively safe walls of Cisco's platform.
Before joining Channel 4 I was commissioned to open the debate with an extended blog post, designed to tempt you in. It's on seeing what would happen if we really embraced the culture 'out there' in our schools. Debate's thin no the ground, though, as might be expected for a new site trying to find its feet.
But this itself reveals the biggest barrier to educational change we have - time. It can take most blogs nearly two years to find their audience, their niche, for the author(s) to find their voice and get some degree of debate going on. Cisco aim to cut back this time, obviously. Part of the challenge is getting those administrators and decision-makers who, thus far, have failed to engage in the online discussions around learning to reach out beyond the relative comfort of the 'safety' of GETIdeas, and explore some of those hyperlinks I've peppered through my piece, at least.
Here, we hit the second batch of time that's only ever more crowded than yesterday or last year: personal time to invest in reading, thinking and then engaging in online debate. It's made harded by Cisco's slightly clunky blog platform which means you and I have to create an account and log in before commenting.
Finally, it'll be interesting to see, over time, if the likes of John Connell can encourage educators who are not just those in International or American schools in the Middle East, Africa and the Far East to engage on the site. This kind of seeded participant would be enough, perhaps, to draw those of us already having the debates into a new platform to discuss things with new voices.