Mobile Learning: Telling Tales

On Thursday I attended Mobile Learning: Telling Tales (#mimasmob09), a one day MIMAS event on mobile devices in education. This was an interesting day - lots of frustration but flashes of genius. There are many interesting developments in the field, but few of them are sustainable.

Graham Brown-Martin was very engaging. I always warm to people with a foot in many camps - he's very much the entrepeneur, but also a self described geek with an arty side who ran off to join the circus!

Graham gave a clear explanation of the importance of gaming in learning, as a way to engage learners and experience learning. I've been dismissive of this in the past, as I couldn't see past all the hype over Second Life. I'm still convinced Second Life in particular has little value but Graham's demonstrations of games / virtual worlds for young children were fantastic. I have no idea how we could apply this in a HE context though, and it looks fantastically expensive.

Graham was also very clear in his condemnation of closed VLEs such as Blackboard, and believes that in future the educational technology market will be dominated by consumer industries rather than educational-specific providers. He had a moving anecdote to demonstrate that unless your VLE is accessible on home devices you a disenfranchising vulnerable parts of society.

John Traxler had the wisest words of the session - that we should "stop funding good projects in the hope that they become sustainable, and instead fund sustainable projects in the hope that they become good". Mobile learning currently has two many amateur enthusiasts. It's difficult to scale stuff up. Few if any projects evaluate their pedagogical impact.

We are teetering on the edge of allowing users to provide their own mobile devices, and designing learning around that. This is difficult with mobile platforms in flux. There is no stable infrastructure to build on. [Perhaps the mobile web - HTML - is the best we have?]

Geoff Butters referenced the Demos report Their Space in his explanation of how young people learn [I must read it]. He then described the EU funded Emapps project. This was interestingly conceived, but by the time it was implemented the project was already out of date. Much of the money was spent on devices and mobile data bills. Sadly an example of the unsustainable approach to mobile learning.
Hilary Smith had a very different approach- using childrens' own mobile phones and free tools such as Youtube, blogs and wikis for Key Stage 3 science. I like the approach, but there were huge practical barriers. Too much time was needed to install third-party software no childrens own mobiles. More fundamentally, almost all schools ban children owning mobiles! Many also block sites such as Youtube. The willingness of teachers to cede control or comfort using technology which may let them down was also an issue.

I missed my ex-colleague Andy Ramsden's presentation on QR codes, as I was in a parallel session. I remain to be convinced that QR codes are the right solution to any real problems - the readers aren't built-in to mainstream mobiles, and they are just a bit too geeky! I hope they get leapfrogged by some other technology.

I also missed Stuart Smith's presentation on the hairdressing.ac.uk mobile website, but I like it as a very practical example of the real-world benefits of mobile learning - taking education out of the classroom and into the salon.

Gary Priestnall's presentation on the SPLINT project was fascinating. This used PDAs on geography field trips. I saw for the first time how augmented reality - display additional data overlaying the real world - can be of educational value. I also now understand why Apple have a digital compass in the iPhone 3GS.

James Clay of Gloucestershire College wrapped up the event and gave the best presentation of the day. He is passionate about learning, understands technology, and is an excellent speaker. His presentation really deserves a blog post of its own - but better still watch The Future of Learning on his own blog.

News of the World phone hacking: how did they do that?

The media was abuzz last week with allegations that investigators working for the News of the World 'hacked' mobile phones belonging to scores of public figures.

How did they actually do it? Graham Cluley, Sophos guesses that they simply accessed the voicemail boxes of the phones concerned. This could be done by a little social engineering. Simply contact the phone provider claiming to be the individual concerned, with a little 'personal' information to convince them. Even easier, try the default PIN code - many people don't change it.

Some suggestions to stop this happening to you:

• Change your mobile phone PIN code from the default to something only you know.
• Keep your private personally identifiable information (things like your mother's maiden name) secret. That's difficult to do I know...
• Do you really want voicemail anyway? Many people find it frustating - often a text is more useful. In that case, just disable it.

On a broader point - mobile phones are one important function which most corporations have already outsourced. Remember the News of the World story when considering outsourcing other services to cloud providers. Obviously similar risks could exist on in house systems, but such problems are easier to fix if in house.

Finally, read confessions of a tabloid hack for a revealing insight into the illegal activities of the press.

Why did JANET Talk fail?

A couple of years ago JANET(UK) announced a pilot VOIP service for UK HE, JANET Talk. The pilot has now finished, and will not be extended to a production service, as there is little apparent demand for it. It was obvious to me from the start that JANET Talk wouldn't be a success. I remember pointedly suggesting as much at the Networkshop session where it was launched. The reason? Network effects - or the lack of them.

Imagine you owned the first telephone in existence. It is completely useless - there is nobody to call. It only becomes useful when someone else bought the second telephone. More precisely, as a telephone network grows, its usefulness increases in proportion to the number of potential connections between people in the network - the square of the number of people. 

JANET Talk was only for people in UK HE to talk to others in UK HE. In todays world - a networked, global world - there is no way that a communications service for such a small group of people will be successful. It will inevitably be overtaken by other services with a larger network of users. People will choose to join the larger, more successful service, as that is what their contacts already use.

There are ways you can let a small network benefit from network effects - by connecting it to other networks. The Internet itself came into existence as exactly that - a network of networks. For a VOIP service, the best way to do this is to allow calls to and from the PSTN. Unfortunately JANET Talk was restricted so that you couldn't receive calls from the PSTN. JANET did this deliberately. They don't want to become a public telecommunications provider, as that would potentially open them up to more regulation. It's a very understandable decision from their point of view but sadly it made JANET Talk irrelevant.

Why is this important? Network effects don't just apply to telephones. Everything these days is networked. Web 2.0 is all about social connections & communications. The same factors explain why only a minority of colleagues at Bristol use our calendar service. It's internal only. This is no help to you if if you collaborate with people outside the University. Instead people choose to use Meetup.com - a free, web-based service which individuals adopt of their own accord, with no involvement from the institution.

I've instinctively understood network effects for years. I learnt my lesson launching ResNet Chat. I watched the small, lonely procession of users log in to the chat room one by one, saw the tumbleweed howling through it, and log off, never to return again, while MSN beckoned brightly. 

Don't let it happen to you. When planning a new service, see if it has built-in positive network effects. It is doesn't have these naturally, find a way to connect it to larger networks so it can benefit from theirs. If you can't find a way to do this then you are dooming your project from the start. You're better off doing nothing, unless you want to see your service become irrelevant, pushed to one side by a larger, more popular one.

(image of network effects courtesy of Wikipedia)

Keep Calm and Carry On - or not?

Image by scottroberts via Flickr

I have a t-shirt I'm fond of wearing with the now cult British wartime slogan Keep Calm and Carry On. I'm very fond of this particularly British message, but when is it appropriate? When do we buckle down and carry on as ever? When do we recognise that the world has changed and we need to change with it or get left behind?

It has been both invigorating and depressing to read a new report from JISC & Demos: The Edgeless University: why higher education must embrace technology. This is a pretty bleak wake-up call to HE in general and IT within HE in particular.

"British Universities have world-class reputations and they are vital to our social and economic future. But they are in a tight spot. The huge public investment that sustained much of the sector is in jeopardy and the current way of working is not sustainable. Some are predicting the end of the university as we have known it."

...that’s just the introduction!

Brian Kelly contributed to the report and highlighted the main themes on the UK Web Focus blog. He picks out one striking quote from a participant:

‘This seminar feels a bit like sitting with a group of record industry executives in 1999’.

Napster launched in 1999. It provided quick easy and illegal access to popular music in MP3. The record industry fought and squashed Napster, but other, impossible to control peer to peer filesharing services sprung up in its place.

Eventually legal music stores arrived, notably the iTunes Store in 2003. Rights holders were properly compensated, but the music was encumbered by DRM and wasn't portable between different MP3 players. Consumers were being asked to pay for a worse experience! It wasn't until 2008 - nearly 10 years later - that the industry finally licensed legal, DRM-free MP3 stores for the most popular content.

It's not just the music industry either. Newspapers are currently going through the same convulsions. They misunderstood the web - they thought that websites were an advert for their product, but it was their product. Now they are desperately struggling to find a new business model.

What about UK HE? As a culture we still don't get the networked economy, and are slow to understand the implications. Again from UK Web Focus:

"A few weeks ago the “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” report was published. And today we see another report which provides a similar top-down view on the importance of Web 2.0 in higher education. If you encounter resistance to change from senior managers in your institution I’d suggest you beat them over the head with these two report[s] until they realise that Web 2.0 is changing the higher educational environment."

To understand the implications of the edgeless university start with Brian Kelly, or better still read the original report (I've also ordered a paper copy which I'll leave in the Bristol Computer Centre staff room). Other good commentaries are from Sarah Bartlett on the Xiphos blog and Chris Sexton, director of Comupting Services at University of Sheffield.

I'll be following up soon with my take on this, starting with reference to another long-sighted Kelly - Kevin Kelly.

What students (and Vice Chancellors) want

It's been an interesting week. We've had a visit from the University Vice Chancellor to Information Services, and several thousand prospective students for the University Open Day. Two excellent opportunities to do some market research - to find out what we should be doing from the top down and the bottom up.

For much of Thursday I was fielding enquiries from sixth formers on the Information Services open day stand. The library was the hot topic, with relatively few queries about IT facilities. Those we did get assumed the existence of facilities but probed their extent: "Do you have Internet in all the rooms?", "Does it stop working if everyone uses it at once?", "Is the Computer Room 24 hours?", "Is there always a computer when I need one?".

Earlier in the week I presented some results from our Student IT Survey of 1400 Bristol students. What do students want? I suggested three requirements:

• It should just work
• It should work with my stuff
• It should be the same everywhere

To these the VC added "It should just work all the time", quoting the example of email as an essential service which we can't afford to go down.

I talked about ResNet and our wireless network as like plumbing - essential utilities which we can't cope without and which work (nearly?) all the time. Once novel, they are now mature, unexciting services. Students do still appreciate them - we score very highly for Internet Access in the International Students Barometer.

We then looked forward, at the personal mobile technology students are starting to carry with them - smartphones and netbooks - and the explosion of innovative web services - Facebook, Google, iTunes, Skype, Twitter, etc etc - which set the standards our students expect. The VC was impressed by the pace of change in IT, and our response to it as an organisation. What would we be important in four years time he wondered? Ebooks perhaps?

Has Open Source won the argument?

"Open Source software has won the argument...it is now generally accepted that the future will involve a blend of proprietary and open-source software" Not my words, but those of a leader in The Economist (a publication more known for a love of free markets than free software).

Why does The Economist like Open Source? Because it reduces the danger of lock-in. Lock-in is an insidious practice which harms customers and leads to monopolies.

"selling software to large companies was sometimes likened to drug dealing, because once a firm installed a piece of software, it had to pay a stream of licence fees for upgrades, security patches and technical support. Switching to a rival product was difficult and expensive. But with open-source software there was much less of a lock-in. There are no licence fees, and the file formats and data structures are open."

I'm a pragmatist on the choice of open source or proprietary software. As an individual I'll happily buy proprietary software if it saves me time or makes my life easier. With an institutional hat on, I'm much more cautious and try to think longer term - what will I get stung for next time? Will I have to buy the whole stack of all the vendor's other products?

True free software abolishes the headache of accounting for all the per user licenses. That's a huge advantage, but sometimes free software just isn't available to do what I want. Next best is proprietary software where the vendor will sell me an easy site licence based simply on head count. That still leaves me worried about data lock-in though. An open source company with a hybrid model - give away the standard product but charge me for the enterprise-ready clustered version - now that's pretty attractive. You'll be using open standards for data storage. Keep your licensing simple and server based (no CALs!). Finally, don't charge too much - but I'm not worried as if you ever do I can take that component out and switch to someone else.

Google Wave: A glimpse of the future

At yesterday's I/O conference Google previewed an early version of Google Wave:

What is Google Wave? It's a communications & collaboration tool from the team formerly responsible for Google Maps. They set out to answer the question "What would email look like if it was invented today?".

Waves combines previously separate functionality into a tool that looks seamless and genuinely new. It's includes elements of email, instant messaging, wikis & collaborative document sharing. What exactly is a Wave? Start of by thinking of a wave as a threaded rich media email or instant message conversation. These are a few of the features:

• Conversations can take place one to one or in groups
• Combines asynchronous and real-time conversation in one.
• Anyone in the conversation can comment, or amend, in place, in the stream of the conversation
• Simply drag and drop documents, pictures etc into your browser to share them with other people
• Rewind and look back through the conversation history

Wave is more than just another Google App. It's also a platform, and a protocol.
A platform: Google's push right now is to get developers on board. You can embed rich content like interactive surveys. There will be plugins and bots to extend Wave how you want - rich content like an interactive survey, spellcheck, even translation. You can embed Waves in your website. Getting a large crowd of developers enthusiastic is a great way to make your platform the one that succeeds.

A protocol: absolutely crucially, Google will release the protocol specification and the code for client and server as open source. They say they want to see many separate but interoperable wave servers - it won't just be a Google App. A company could implement their own private Wave server which will talk to other Wave servers in the cloud, or at other organisations (just like SMTP today) . When the goal is a big as defining the next version of email, that's essential, and it is why I'm excited about Wave. The functionality looks excellent, but it would do no good at all in an isolated environment. I can have all the clever communications software I want, but it is useless unless the people I need to talk to have it too. I don't want a proprietary unified communications product which only works within my organisation - I want an open, global tool which everyone uses. Google have the resources to develop the tool, and by opening the standard the ensure that anyone who wants to can use it.

Communicationss & collaboration tools are normally seen as an enterprise requirement, but Google are a consumer company at heart. This will help them do groupware properly. JWZ put it crudely but got it right in his 2005 essay, Groupware Bad: The first question a social software developer should ask is "how will this software help my users get laid?". If you prefer, how will it make it easier for them to do what they want to do - meet and communicate? Good groupware solves problems for people, bad groupware tries to solves problems for organisations that no actual users want. Google grok this. They say "Google Wave can make you more productive even when you're having fun!".

What are the implications? Wave is hugely important in its own right and also demonstrates Google's strategy more generally. The implications look terrible for Microsoft:

• Google often say that they can do anything in a browser you can do in a native desktop application. As they put it, "never underestimate the browser". Wave uses elements from the HTML5 spec, which extends HTML further towards rendering complex applications. It's taken over ten years, but finally the web is becoming the platform.
• Although the ratified HTML5 spec is some way off, Firefox, Chrome, Safari & Opera already support key parts of it. Internet Explorer doesn't (yet?). If it doesn't, tools like Wave will be compelling enough to shift users away from Internet Explorer to other browsers. Microsoft either need to catch up and support modern web standards fully, or lose market share.
• Nobody else is going to propose a next-gen email protocol with Wave in the offing. By open sourcing Wave Google scare off potential competition. Who wants to go head to head with the gorilla? The only company with both the resources and willingness to do so on this is Microsoft. They difference is that Google's money is from advertising, Microsoft's from software. Microsoft can't afford to open source their software to define the next standard - they'd destroy their revenue. Google, can, and just just did. [As a side note, Microsoft purchased Groove, a very Wave-like product in 2005, and then had no idea what to do with it].

Poor Microsoft. On the day Microsoft announce Bing (another attempt to merely catch up on search) Google are racing ahead...

Wave is exciting, but maybe there's too much hyperbole over it already. I'll finish with a few notes of caution:

• Wave isn't ready or available yet. So far the developers attending the I/O conference are the only people with access to it. Google suggest that Wave will be available to consumers later in 2009. My guess is that we are at least 12 months away from Wave appearing in the corporate version of Google Apps, or getting the source code to deploy your own Wave server.
• It's not clear how Wave fits in a mobile world. Threaded, interactive conversations with rich media work well on a large screen.
• Email isn't going to disappear. Although Wave is an attempt to redesign email from the ground up, email is quick, cheap, lightweight, easy, and universal.
• Wave doesn't include voice or video communications. In the Googleverse, how does Wave fit in with Google Voice?

A truly unified communications tool should include voice too. Add a few more years for Unified Communications then - by which time our requirements for unified communications will have broadened even further. Perhaps this Holy Grail is as far away as ever - but we've just had a tantalising glimpse.