by Derek Morrison, 28 February 2010

Any views expressed in this online essay are those of the author alone and should not be construed as necessarily representing the view of any other individuals or organisations.

My apologies to the Coen brothers for the abuse of their No Country for Old Men. In this posting I am attempting to extend and merge the themes addressed in two earlier postings. First, Are you digital natives paying attention? (Auricle 6 February 2010) and Ebooks what ebooks? (Auricle, 21 February, updated 24 February). The conceptual mashup constituents are attention, reading, words, books and ebooks. Read the rest of this entry »

by Derek Morrison, 21 February 2010 (updated 24 February 2010)

Any views expressed in this online essay are those of the author alone and should not be construed as necessarily representing the view of any other individuals or organisations.

In a fairly detached way I’ve been interested in the trajectory of the ebook concept and how it would eventually come to be realised in a mainstream way.To date I have been happy to let the pioneers and early adopters cut down some of the undergrowth so that we could begin to glean some of the more interesting and potentially educationally profitable directions. Recently, however, some personal experiences of using e-reader software on a new smartphone has caused me to reflect on what a useful form factor of an ebook has to be and how this contrasts with other perceptions of the ebook concept which can be the polar opposite of what most end-users think of as a book, i.e. for the purposes of my posting it’s a highly portable physical entity that is a vector for, and presenter of, organised information or a narrative. Note that “highly portable physical entity” emphasis. Read the rest of this entry »

by Derek Morrison, 6 February 2010 (updated 10 & 23 February 2010)

N.B. Any personal views expressed in this posting are those of the author alone and should not be construed as necessarily representing the view of any other individual or organisation.

In their two new well-researched productions both the US PBS and the UK BBC/OU are individually but synergistically creating a wonderful set of resources for students of the digital world and for those generally interested in the impacts of the internet and the web on our lives. Apart from the high quality content and supporting resources both the PBS and BBC/OU productions have, in different ways, adopted a welcome multi-platform “open” approach which means that the broadcast and archive materials become part of a much richer resource by including blogs, user generated content or pre production commentary, and repurposing of some material from the productions for non-profit educational purposes is actively encouraged. At the moment, however, I think the educational merit gold star should be awarded to the US production. Read the rest of this entry »

by Derek Morrison, 28 January 2010 (updated 30 January and 4 February)

I’ve got a serious ebooks posting in the works which I’ve been delaying until Apple launched what some in the geek community called the Messiah Machine or what we now know to be its official name iPad. That posting is for the future but at the moment I don’t know if the iPad will ever gain the traction of the iPhone/iTouch models or whether its Messiah status will be realised by providing a rescue model for the various manifestations of the print media that seem to be placing considerable hope that such digital devices will finally begin to stem losses from the dramatic fall in print income.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but chuckle about the latest Downfall mashup on YouTube Hitler Responds to the iPad (robust language/subtitling warning).

Postscript
By way of a partial antidote to the Downfall mashup above I offer the following BBC news demonstration of the Apple iPad in action (BBC News, 28 January 2010). Despite the blogosphere and other polemics, I don’t rush to write off the iPad, there’s something attractive there and it may well prove the naysayers wrong; for example, try browsing a full colour web site in an Amazon Kindle, or any type of website using an Amazon Kindle in the UK – at the time of writing you can’t. And despite the polemics there are also advocates for the iPad as a new type of open standard based (epub) e-book platform, e.g. Seeing Through the Apple (and ‘Avatar’) Hyperbole (New York Times, 29 January 2010) or Three Reasons Why the iPad WILL Kill Amazon’s Kindle (New York Times, 30 January 2010).

But … there are undoubtedly serious constraints in the iPad. If only there was a USB port. If only its welcome adoption of the open ePub ebook standard for its “iBook” store extended to de facto standards so that it would play Flash video embedded in web sites (Apple appears to be shooting itself in the foot over this one – but see addendum). If only it was lighter. If only it was a little smaller – say A5 book size. If only it had a removable battery. If only it had multitasking. If only it is found to be a useful “tool” rather than an expensive coffee table “toy”. The latter “if only” contains a certain irony in that the Apple iPad has an optional keyboard which in effect transforms it into something akin to a two part netbook – a device derided by Steve Jobs in his launch of the iPad. Viewed from this perspective Apple has in fact created a new variant of the netbook. A keyboard and recharging dock is also pending.

Whether this first iteration of the iPad gains significant traction beyond the Apple fanboys is perhaps less important than the impact upon the future designs of the wanabees. Any user of the iPhone or iTouch interface will know what I mean. A Google NexusPad, (aka NexusTablet, NexusSlate, Google Messiah perhaps?)

Addendum
Given the current ubiquity of Adobe’s Flash video on the web it is reasonable to assume that the absence of Flash handling on the iPhone, iTouch or the new iPad is an Apple “own goal”. But Charles Arthur’s Now Flash is getting the ‘dear John’ treatment from Apple, what’s its future? offers an alternative perspective (Guardian online, 2 February 2010). The article also explains why video streaming via the BBC iPlayer and YouTube does work on the Apple devices; and it isn’t Adobe’s Flash that does it. In the end most people won’t care; they will just want a rich media page to just work on multiple devices without worrying about plugins, codecs, file formats, etc etc.

by Derek Morrison, 23 January 2010

N.B. The following item represents the views of the author alone and should not be construed as necessarily representing the views of any other individual or organisation.

The UK Open University is joining the growing number of institutions adopting or exploring the Google Apps for Education offering. Another notable presences in this space are the University of Alberta and, in the UK, the University of Westminster. Is this another contributory blip or does it signal a fundamental paradigm shift? If good experiences are reported back over a protracted period then it could well be the latter. One “cloud” disaster, or exploitation by Google of a de facto monopoly position, however, and all bets are off.

Either way, university Directors of ICT (or the equivalent) have much cause for reflection at a time of extraordinary financial retraction even if only so that they can effectively hold back the waters that will soon be be pushing against the dam for a little longer. But look carefully at the user comments being cited by Google; they relate to far more than just email with words like “collaboration”, “sharing”, “remote working”, and “discussion” figuring large. I think here is much cause for reflection by everyone else working and learning in the HE sector as well as those whose current business models and services are linked to what may fast be becoming an obsolete view of how things can/ will increasingly be done in the future.

Postscript
There some big names now making use of Google Apps including the Telegraph Media Group, Taylor Woodrow, and Guardian News and Media. Interestingly, in 2009, the latter also dropped Microsoft Office and adopted the OpenOffice product as its in-house wordprocessing application with Google Apps being projected as its primary productivity application. Sun Microsystems was the main sponsor of OpenOffice and now that they have been recently absorbed into the Oracle empire if OpenOffice withers as a result then that may simply further reinforce the postition of Google Apps as the main disruptor to the established order.

The European Commission supported ReVICa (Reviewing European Virtual Campuses) Project has recently published the book Reviewing the Virtual Campus Phenomenon: The Rise of large-scale e-Learning Initiatives Worldwide. The book provides a glimpse into global managed initiatives that seek to transcend the walls of physical institutions in order to realise a lifelong learning and skills agenda.

by Derek Morrison, 14 January 2010

Tag clouds (or weighted lists) provide a visualisation of a word’s frequency in a document. As well as providing an aesthetic and navigation artefact for web sites they may also provide useful meta information about the relative emphases in the content of a document, e.g. the textual analysis of a political speech. One service which makes the job of creating such visual artefacts really easy is the online Wordle service. Although the Wordle service modestly describes itself as a “toy” it appears to be being employed in some interesting ways by some interesting people. For example, in Wordles, or the gateway drug to textual analysis (ProfHacker, 21 October 2009) and Using Wordle in the classroom (ProfHacker, 13 November 2009) both describe Wordle as a useful pedagogical tool. In the UK, Aberystwyth University which is one of the HEIs taking part in the Academy’s Gwella initiative is also employing Wordle in several contexts, e.g. Welsh and other language teaching.

So for this posting I’ve employed the online service at Wordle to generate a rudimentary visualisation for each chapter of the UK Higher Education Academy’s new book Transforming Higher Education Through Technology Enhanced Learning. You can either click on each thumbnail to view a full-size image or I have aggregated the text, hyperlinks, and all the images into a PDF file available for download at the end of the posting so that readers can then zoom the images for offline display purposes. Hopefully, there won’t be any surprises for the authors about the relative emphases of what they have written. I’ve also provided links to downloads of the full book as well as the individual chapters. Read the rest of this entry »

“… too much political effort online simply mimics traditional marketing-driven campaigning – treating voters as little more than shoppers, and policies as slickly packaged products. The overlooked lesson of Obama’s campaign is that it treated voters as citizens with active roles in a democratic society rather than passive consumers swayed by party marketing.”
Source: The internet and politics: Revolution.com (Guardian editorial, 4 January 2010)

The above quote contains an important message for those who think that the simple act of using a technology of the moment is a magic gateway to progressing a political or policy agenda. “I know we’ll go on to Facebook, upload a podcast, and make a guest appearance on YouTube”.

As some political figures have already found engaging with social media for political purposes [YouTube video] can have distinctly unpredictable results with the artefact or social media contribution (or unexpected derivatives thereof) quickly becoming part of the many evolving and very long-lived digital archives that are emerging in democratic societies. But ignoring social media and such digital archives is also not an option for those who would court public support. Others may choose to leverage such systems and so a message perhaps intended for one context can can suddenly take on viral properties when injected into the social networking ether; as one US politician found to his cost in the 2006 Senate elections. [YouTube video]

Postscript (updated 22 January 2010)
See also the following NPR item Republican Politicians Make A Social Media Push which illustrates how US politicians are desperately trying to catch-up with the Obama team’s domination of this space.

by Derek Morrison, 9 January 2010

The BBC’s Radio 4 transmits the 10 minute programme A Point of View which they describe as “a weekly reflection on a topical issue”. The 8 January 2010 reflection was on ebooks and offered by Lisa Jardine under the title A Page Turning Passion. The transcript and MP3 download are worth a read/listen but you had better not delay. As a public service broadcaster I do wish the BBC would mimic the US NPR programme On the Media and maintain a long term archive of transcripts/audio downloads – 7 days is a nonsense for material like this.

Lisa Jardine is an established broadcaster, author, and academic historian. She is Director of the AHRB Research Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, and Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London; she is an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

“What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare. Click. No time to stand beneath the boughs – click, click – and stare as long as sheep or cows. Click, click, bloody click … photography, once a noble art, has become, thanks to the move to digital, a mental illness.”

Source: Nigel Farndale, Why live your life through a view-finder? (The Telegraph, 22 August 2009)

See also The rise of the camera-phone (Stuart Jeffries, Guardian, 8 January 2010)