Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

"People act different behind cameras": strangely disturbing cartoon

Via Graham Linehan's blog and Techcrunch is This American Life examining our attitudes to censorship, citizen journalism and how people change when they're behind a camera.

Shocker! | Cable TV News and Public Sector Leaders: They're The Same!

I love watching Jon Stewart's continued picking apart of the bias in cable TV news, notably in Fox (the YouTube clips should suffice as explanation). Now, Seth talks about how Cable TV News' attitudes can be seen in any board room around the world:

1. Focus on the urgent instead of the important.
2. Vivid emotions and the visuals that go with them as a selector for what's important.
3. Emphasis on noise over thoughtful analysis.
4. Unwillingness to reverse course and change one's mind.
5. Xenophobic and jingoistic reactions (fear of outsiders).
6. Defense of the status quo encouraged by an audience self-selected to be uniform.
7. Things become important merely because others have decided they are important.
8. Top down messaging encourages an echo chamber (agree with this edict or change the channel).
9. Ill-informed about history and this particular issue.
10. Confusing opinion with the truth.
11. Revising facts to fit a point of view.
12. Unwillingness to review past mistakes in light of history and use those to do better next time.

From Seth Godin's Blog

I'd say there are a good few educational and Governmental establishments where at least 11 of these hold true in day-to-day practice. Shouldn't every organisation, public or private, check itself on a regular basis against these statements? If you did it on your own one right now, how many statements can be seen in your work?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Fox News Fear Imbalance
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[Video not available outside US]

Pic: Bush takes responsibility. Jon looks shocked.

Why backward social-network-banning education authorities are wrong

Where many education authorities continue to routinely block, filter and ban social networks not just for youngsters but for teaching and management staff, new research from Gartner (via Euan Semple) reveals yet more logic behind opening up networks and encouraging teachers, learners and managers to network online as well as at their twice-a-year in-service get-togethers:

"While a job may be regarded as an economic transaction, the human brain thinks of the workplace as a social system," she said. Social networking can make employees "feel valued, a part of a community, and earn the respect of peers."

Read more here. I therefore continue to be disheartened by the backward policies of regions such as Argyll and Bute, who admit that "social networking sites are blocked in all schools as policy... Staff are not able to maintain or access personal sites such as their own blogs or Twitter pages through the council's network." They want teachers to share practice through "all available means", but one can only assume they mean the telephone, one-to-one email or pigeon carrier. A shame really, since when I was a student at school there in the late eighties we were using Macs for desktop publishing and the authority area was a world leader in video conferencing for isolated community learning aeons before the rest of the world got the Skype collaboration bug. But, as they say, you're only as good as your last gig...

Three years ago the national education agency in Scotland and Don Ledingham, the then education chief in East Lothian, took the lead and paid me public cash to help amplify the groundbreaking, award-winning work with colleagues in East Lothian, who continue to reap the educational and managerial benefits of a more-or-less open network and promotion of sharing practice through blogging and Twitter amongst many platforms.

It is therefore becoming increasingly embarrassing to me that, three years on, most education authorities in Scotland continue to be ignorant of the possibilities, fearful of the occasional [human] mistake (and at a loss, it would seem, about what to do when someone does make such a human error).

Adding to the embarrassment is the apparent own-goal scored by me and my colleagues whose learnings are often adopted more enthusiastically in countries elsewhere around the globe while those leading education on our own doorstep put caution ahead of innovation. Our £35m national intranet has just added functionality of blogs and wikis, three years after I recommended they be the keystone 'learning diaries' of a personal profile. This is good, but it is slow.

What do I reckon could be done (only my tuppence worth, I add...) In a recent interview for Merlin John's new Innovators series I outline how I believe things could change:

• design new and use existing tools and learning spaces that entice and delight young people, rather than tools contrived "for schools" which we have to mandate them to use - if the kid had a choice, would they use that or the competition?;
• plan less up front, 'for the sake of planning', creating time and room for movement as innovations come up;
• stand still and do nothing: carve out time to look at what is working in the world around you and steal, steal, steal (and give credit where it's due);
  
• if there's a bandwagon, jump on it and see if it goes anyhere (a Coulterism, but not that kind of Coulterism);
• don't do pilots, just do the real deal from the start (you can still start small and fail quietly, but the word 'pilot' tends to preempt an assumption of failure).
  

Pic of phone [what you can use to collaborate in the meantime]
Thanks to Doug Belshaw's post for making me go back and fill in more detail on the above bullets.

Channel 4 signs worldwide-first YouTube deal: watch our telly on your interweb box

YouTube and Channel 4 (who pay my mortgage) have signed a pioneering content deal which will make the broadcaster’s original programmes available on demand, in full and free-of-charge via YouTube in the UK. By early 2010 all of our current programming and about 3000 hours of archive will be available to search and view at your leisure.

This is big news, as it marks the first time that a broadcaster anywhere in the world has made a comprehensive catch-up schedule available on YouTube, providing Channel 4 with additional advertising inventory and reach: YouTube last week announced it was serving over 1 billion video streams every day.

Under the terms of the deal, Channel 4 will make its 4oD video-on-demand ‘catch-up’ service of new programmes available via YouTube shortly after television transmission, including series that have already proved particularly popular with online audiences such as Skins, Hollyoaks, The Inbetweeners and Peep Show. YouTube users will also be able to access around 3,000 hours of full length programming from the Channel 4 archive at any given time, including shows like Brass Eye, Derren Brown, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Teachers and many others.

The partnership runs for an initial term of at least three years and the two parties will share advertising revenues on an agreed formula. The deal will create significant value for Channel 4 and its independent production partners, generating additional revenue to invest in creating high quality, original content.

Channel 4's will have a branded presence on YouTube and will be able to sell advertising around its content on the site. The agreement also allows Channel 4 to sell advertising around some non-Channel 4 content on YouTube for the first time, expanding the amount of inventory available to its sales team and bringing its considerable expertise in advertising around full length TV content to the YouTube platform. It will help Channel 4 develop its advertising sales proposition in digital, including the use of YouTube’s demographic targeting tools to target advertising against Channel 4 content on YouTube.

The deal builds significantly on Channel 4 and YouTube’s existing partnership; Channel 4 was the first broadcaster to sell pre-roll advertisements on YouTube clips, and the first UK broadcaster (before iPlayer) to put all its programmes online for viewing on demand with 4oD.

Simon Cowell's letter to his younger, cocky self

In an age where celebrity is held higher esteem by tweens and teens than ever before, Simon Cowell has emerged as an unlikely superstar: old enough to be most teens' dad, appearing to have the Midas touch where everything he touches turns to gold, the evil-turned-soft record label mogul.

In the last week, he's written a letter to his younger self which every admiring fame- and money-obssessed youngster should read to gain a worthwhile reality check.

On the eve of his 50th birthday last week wrote a letter to his younger self (A letter to my shallow, reckless, cocky younger self). It charts the rise and fall and rise and another fall of the boy who thought he had it all when, in fact, his bank account read zero:

"Look at you. You look like a complete idiot. Could you be any worse? You are about as bad an example of Eighties' excess as you could possibly be.

"You are overconfident, far too cocky and dressed from head to toe in expensive designer gear. Armani and Versace. Oh, nothing but the best for you Simon! It hasn't dawned on you yet, you idiot, that you can't afford any of this stuff.

"You believe that everything is just going to get bigger and bigger and that you are an intrinsic part of it all. You are up there, riding so high, that you cannot see what is really happening.

"What the hell is that outside your interior designed, four-bedroom house in Fulham? Please don't tell me it is a Porsche? Doh! Of course it is, what else could it be? You are driving a Porsche because everyone did in those days."

Read more of it over on the Daily Mail, and, if you recognise the cocky youngster about to lose it all (for the first time) sitting in your classroom, maybe send them the link.

When "related items" goes wrong

After a tip from Twitter buddy @dav_hamill at Edinburgh Coffee Morning today I discovered some of the pitfalls of "related items" type searches on, say Amazon. On the German Amazon site a search for "aluminium baseball bat" turns up some unexpected results, show that even muggers, bandits and thugs seek out good deals on their kit:

16 Ways To Win £25k And Change Informal Learning In The UK: TeachUsABetterWay

British education and technology agency Becta has emulated The Cabinet Office's style for accessing the best ideas our citizens have to offer, by opening a national competition for ideas on how we can best help people access information on informal learning opportunities, with TeachUsALesson:

You might have a vision of an amazing design for a learning portal website, or a concept of an awesome live data feed which other sites and services could use. Or, maybe, you could help design a Facebook widget, or an iPhone app which could make finding learning opportunities a doddle.

There are £25,000 packages of dosh available for the best ideas to come forward, presenting a timely and enviable opportunity for those with visions of how simple uses of existing technologies could be harnessed to help 'regular' learners outside the schooling system discover the learning moments on their doorstep.

It's great to such an innovative approach to seeking ideas. I only hope the Great British Learning Public can come up with ideas to match.

Through my work as Digital Commissioner with Channel 4's 4iP I've gone through a Himalayan-like learning curve in assessing the hundreds of ideas we receive each quarter. Throughout the year I've been blogging much of these learnings over on the digital media industry community I founded at 38minutes. Here are some of the main posts which will hopefully be of some use in stimulating creative ideas (and knocking on the head those puppies that might be worth killing):

1. Has Google Done It? Check the Goollery
2. Do It First: Find Your Zag
3. An Idea Shared is Worth Something - stop worrying about intellectual property
4. Barack's Social Media Pulpit: models for social media spreading
5. Asking yourself the "what happens if..." questions
6. Business Models: A Starter for 10
7. "Users will sign in". Will They? Identity, Trust and Your Idea
8. Designing sites no-one has to visit
9. Commissioning for attention must-reads
10. T&RED of R&D? How developed should a pitch be?
11. Brevity is a blessing: how to pitch
12. We're from the internet and we're here to help
13. Mark Earls: Why are good ideas important?
14. How to help people better use the net: go to them, open up, let them copy
15. danah boyd on handheld social networking
16. Remixing Cities, Remixing Learning: Charlie Leadbeater

Photo by Guille

On wanting to see more daring institutions challenge their users

We invest millions in "technologies for learning" and often bypass those which are not explicitly designed for that "learning market", especially if this general purpose technology also happens to be free. iTunes U exists not because the iTunes Store itself is so terrible at attracting and sharing learning content - it's actually more successful - but because traditional institutions and those working in them want educational stuff to be labeled educational. Give us a tin that says it'll be good for us and we'll eat it, even if the contents are as sugary as the stuff sold in the other tins.

No, we prefer in eduland to use technologies which are slow-moving (the slower the better), costly and not interoperable with the 'realworld' technologies we use outside the institution (I'm still looking for the Virtual Learning Environment that bites the bullet and allows cross-postings to and from a kid's Bebo or Facebook profile).

Martin Weller sums up what we have settled for with most Virtual Learning Environments: they are to learning what PowerPoint has been to presention. In the hands of a (rare) maestro either tool adds value. In the hands of the rest of us, they tend to bore young people, relative to the other technological wonders to which they are used. Moreover,when an educator starts using either technology they stand a real risk of getting hooked on this low-grade drug of connectivity, without ever finding the high quality, more complex and engaging stuff that lies beyond:

I think what the VLE and Powerpoint have in common is that they are in the first wave of digital democratization tools.

Such tools can’t be too far removed from traditional practice, otherwise people simple won’t use them. So they provide a useful stepping stone onto a more digitally enhanced future (where it’s always sunny and everyone loves each other).

The danger with both of them is that they represent not a potential stage on a journey for many, but the endpoint. Their ease of use and similarity to existing practice is seductive in this sense, you don’t really have to change what you do much.

"We're boring the kids" is, unfortunately, an argument which, despite its powerful and valid reasoning, is too easily dismissed by beancounters and risk-averse compliance-obsessed decision-makers as something for which we can strive but never quite attain given the multitude of other, far more important concerns (two of which will always be the security and safety scapegoats, arguments for which they also strive, believe to have attained but actually never can).

Most Virtual Learning Environments would, in a consumer-led market (i.e. student-led market) not make it past the beta, and wouldn't interest any Angel or VC investor in further support - the market wouldn't bite when there are so many other ways of engaging with content and people online which are fun in so many other ways. They succeed largely down to, at worst, a laziness on the part of institutions, at best a reluctance to challenge their 'customers' or users to see the world differently.

Brian Kelly presents a compelling argument for not sticking to this Microsoft- and institution-led status quo in which we find ourselves. Brian is nervous about a world of institutionalised users using institutional equipment, software and services which are operated, developed, run and molded by faceless corporations, themselves happy with the ignorance of the user base in what lies beyond the current offerings from technology.

...If the initial evidence reflects a more general trend, we seem to be living in a world in which most users use an MS Windows platform to access institutional resources – they’re not interested in Linux, for example, despite many years of evangelism from the open source community. A computer’s a computer, just like a fax machine is a fax machine – only nerds care about what goes on underneath the bonnet.

But if this is true, what are the implications for accepting that we are in a postdigital age?  Don’t we then accept that our IT environment will be owned by the mega-corporations – Google and Microsoft. And let’s forget debates about device independence and interoperability – unless the mega-corporations feel such issues may provide a competitive edge.

It strikes me that the postdigital agenda is a conservative one, in which we are asked to accept that we (in our institutions and in our working environment) cannot shape our digital environment. And for me that is a worrying point of view which I don’t accept.

Update: There's another interesting, pedagogical aside, which shows not only that there might be 'postdigital' reasons like Brian's not to let Learning Management Systems or Course Management Systems (CMS) run over us willynilly, but that there are teaching and learning reasons, too. New research shows that by accepting the defaults of a CMS educators can find their pedagogy affected negatively, too, moving towards a more administrative bent:

The defaults of the CMS therefore tend to determine the way Web–novice faculty teach online, encouraging methods based on posting of material and engendering usage that focuses on administrative tasks.

Quite literally, teaching by checkbox?

Pic by James Jordan

Young and addicted to social networks: and they've never written so much

Clive Thompson in Wired has summed up some definitive research that backs up what many of us have been saying from our guts for years: kids have never been reading and writing so much, and with the proliferation of social networks and mobile messaging this stat will only increase with time:

Andrea Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

Not only that but the writing is of an excellent technical standard, with status updates training our youngsters in the kind of "haiku-like concision" that their verbose parents could only dream of.

It's the kind of research that would have proven handy 18 months or so ago, when I had helped colleagues design some of the most forward-thinking literacy policies in the world, where text messages, computer games and blogs were deemed suitable 'texts' to study alongside the great classics. I got a bit of a hard time for condoning this at the time, and still get a rocky ride in believing that iPhones and iPod Touches could be amongst the digital toolkits in which our most reluctant readers might find the reading bug.

But it still felt right, and feels more right than ever now. Go read, digest and share.

Pic by Mads Berg in Wired.

Size does matter

I get sent a lot of ideas for web services that will "appeal to a niche" and, thanks to that book, we're all expected to bow at the Alter of The Long Tail and drink the nectar of the microbrand. I've never been so sure. If you ask me to make the call between a half-empty macrobiotic boutique restaurant and a packed, noisy French bistrot with music that's just a tad too loud, you know which one I'd go for. For ideas to come into existence you only need two. To thrive and survive towards a sustainable future it needs more than village.

The size of the communities around us does matter. That's why more and more of us head to the city, for sure. The more people, the more opportunity to interact, the more opportunity to make good things happen. Or so we'd like to hope, anyway.

I like this WSJ colour piece by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who features in the video above, as he describes what makes the perfect city. His opinion on size is revealing in the physical world, and sends a reminder to those designing communities in the virtual one: size does matter:

A city can't be too small. Size guarantees anonymity—if you make an embarrassing mistake in a large city, and it's not on the cover of the Post, you can probably try again. The generous attitude towards failure that big cities afford is invaluable—it's how things get created. In a small town everyone knows about your failures, so you are more careful about what you might attempt. Every time I visit San Francisco I ask out loud "Why don't I live here? Why do I choose to live in a place that is harder, tougher and, well, not as beautiful?" The locals often reply, "You don't want to live here. It looks like a city, but it's really a small village. Everyone knows what you're doing" Oh, OK. If you say so. It's still beautiful.

There's a lesson in here for lots of online initiatives in education: the attempt to encourage rather than lead by mandate the use of Scotland's national intranet Glow, the desire to evolve the TeachMeet form of unconference professional development towards something that 'makes change happen', the desire to shake the often unnecessary constraint of national testing in the US and elsewhere.

I still stand with my gut firmly in place: the niche is useful for getting a new trend or fad started, but to move beyond the fad and into the mainstream, for general acceptance to occur and change to follow, you need size. You need the distractions and noise of the city, the niches you don't appreciate, to make your own ideas fly.

Read more of David's piece on the WSJ site.