Augmented reality meets print

Print media is under some heavy fire at the moment with devices like the iPad hoping to push the business over to digital format. Certainly digital versions of popular magazines on a high definition screen will open up many exciting new avenues but will there still be room for the print editions? The following video presents an unlikely link-up between the hi-tech world of augmented reality and a print magazine.

German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin has teamed up with augmented reality developers Metaio to produce the first print magazine that can be viewed through an AR application in a smartphone. The whole concept is still under development and the features shown in the video are merely a taste of what will be possible in the near future. Now, when does all this hit the education sector?



Soon after writing this I found another magazine also using AR this month, Time Out New York. See article Time Out New York premiers mobile augmented reality cover.

Learning by failing

At conferences you generally only hear about success. We learn from good examples. Sometimes however the sound of success can have the opposite effect, especially when you're working on a project that is stuck in the mud. It might be useful to hear about all the ideas and projects that didn't make it and try to understand why they failed.

That's why I was intrigued by an article called Failing in public -- one way to talk openly about (and learn from) 'failed' projects on the World Bank blog EduTech. It tells of a recent conference FAILfare in Washington DC where delegates presented projects that went wrong and tried to analyse why. An excellent idea since to err is human and by discussing our shortcomings we can work out strategies for succeeding later.

As the conference organisers put it:
"Sharing success stories and case studies, while helpful, isn’t enough. Talking openly and seeing where we have failed may help us learn, make better decisions, and avoid making the same mistakes again."

I feel we have become so focused on positive thinking and success that talking of failure and problems has become almost a taboo. I've listened to many speeches by extremely successful people who have climbed Everest, sailed solo round the world, built up companies and won gold medals but I can't say I have really learned much from them. They're simply too far away from my world. But listening to people who grapple with the more mundane challenges that I deal with can certainly inspire me since I can directly relateto them. You can't really win in life unless you have experienced failure and maybe by sometimes allowing ourselves to focus on faults we can learn from them.

Clouds on the open learning horizon?

The theme of the latest edition of Educause Review is open education and there are several excellent articles by some of the leading figures in the OER movement like George Siemens, Dave Cormier and David Wiley. Amidst all the enthusiasm it was interesting to read one article that cast a little shadow, Never mind the edupunks or the great web 2.0 swindle by Brian Lamb and Jim Groom.

The main point of the article is that despite the advances made by open education we are becoming increasingly dependent on commercial forces. We entrust vast amounts of our thoughts and creativity to corporations like Google, Facebook and Apple and the authors are worried that true openness can be compromised by commercial interests.

"Has the wave of the open web crested, its promise of freedom crashed on the rocks of the proprietary web? Can open education and the corporate interests that control mainstream Web 2.0 co-exist? What does "open educational technology" look like, and does it stand for anything? Do higher education institutions dare seize a mission of public service in fostering an open web worthy of the name? Can ambition and idealism prevail in an age of economic austerity? Finally, what is the role of the open educational technologist—that is, the "open ed tech"?"

As more and more universities distribute lectures via iTunes U or communicate with gmail or Google Apps there are also concerns about putting educational material in the hands of for-profit organisations. There are of course plenty success stories when it comes to open source tools, open access publishing and creative commons licensing. But when it comes to ease of use and attractiveness of design the commercial products are often just too tempting - and they're free.

The trouble with Facebook, Google, Apple and friends is that the prime customer for them is the advertiser because that's where the revenue comes from. We provide content and attract other users who will then see the ads. Should educational resources be placed in that arena at all, subject to market fluctuations? You can put your entire project in the hands of Google for example but what if they decide to pull the plug on the services or make it a pay service, as Ning did recently with its social networking tool?

Should education try to steer clear of commercial forces and aim for truly open solutions? The authors seem to think so:

"We strongly believe that higher education should embrace a mission to create, cultivate, and promote "safe spaces" that are not only open but also free from overtly commercialized interests ... We dream of higher education that embraces its role as a guardian of knowledge, that energetically creates and zealously protects publicly-minded spaces promoting enlightenment and the exchange of ideas. We need green spaces for conviviality on the web. Institutions of higher education—and the open ed techs who work in them—are in a unique position to create and preserve these spaces."

The suggestion is that web 2.0, having promised so much in terms of collaboration and freedom, has been hi-jacked by big business and that we somehow should try to avoid letting education sell its soul. I sympathise with the idea but whenever a good idea comes along someone will make money out of it. The challenge is to be aware of the drawbacks of relying on commercial solutions, especially if they are free, and to strike a balance between knowing when to take the commercial route and when to find a more open alternative.

Copyright black hole

Below is a talk by James Boyle (Duke University) called The incredible shrinking public domain taken from a conference of the Open Rights Group a short time ago. In it he talks about the absurdity that vast amounts of books, films and photos are locked away from public view because of existing copyright legislation. These are works that are no longer commercially available but cannot be reproduced due to copyright. Libraries are full of archive material that could be of interest but is sadly almost impossible to trace. It could be scanned and put on to the net. The authors earn nothing from these works any more and in many cases they are dead but due to copyright the works are locked away for ever.

Boyle calls this a black hole whereby copyright law has cut us off from our collective heritage. He does not advocate total freedom from copyright. Works that are still commercially viable may happily continue to generate income but the vast majority of material will never generate a penny so why not let it out into the light of the public domain?

This reminds me of an example I heard from a colleague about how a museum's collection of 19th century photos were released with Creative Commons licences. These photos had not been seen by anyone for dozens of years but within a few months some of them had been viewed by thousands of people on Flickr.


[ORGCon] James Boyle: The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain from Open Rights Group on Vimeo.

Bookends

I have collected an awful lot of things over the years. The house is full of books, magazines, records, videos, coins, stamps, ornaments, pictures and so on. It takes a lot of space and a great deal of it could be disposed of without making much of a difference to my life. I'm rather fond of these collections of course, in particular my books, but I wonder how much longer we will need to devote so much space to storing them.

  by  maxually 

Books are like trophies, showing my interests and tastes. I like to scan other people's bookcases to see what we have in common, as I used to do with record collections. But what happens when all of this is digital? If you can access the world's music or books on the net and download instantly for free of for a small fee what is the point of having a collection? E-book sales are growing sharply and already Amazon are selling more digital literature than hard copy.  My old record collection gathers dust in a cupboard today and I now have my entire music collection on an iPod. If all my books are stored on, say, an iPad in the future will this mean the end of the bookcase? Is IKEA's massively popular bookcase Billy heading for extinction?

I don't think the book will disappear any time soon but some types of book will. Paperback literature will probably be phased out first since we tend to buy them on the spur of the moment, read them and them never look at them again. Textbooks are another perfect category to go digital. We buy extremely expensive volumes as students that tend to be obsolete within a year. Textbook publishers love to revise these books annually to counter the second hand market between students. If they were digital you would always have access to the latest information instead of having bookshelves groaning under the weight of useful thousand page tomes such as Microsoft Windows 95 for Dummies. For some interesting discussion of online textbooks read a new article in Forbes, Why can't textbooks be free? (there's also a lengthy discussion under the article)

However there will be a place for quality books, richly illustrated and with an appealing layout, feel and design. I have many books (art, photography, nature etc) that would not transfer so well onto a laptop. A book can be a beautiful object in itself and is a permanent record to refer to. I have many books on subjects that I would probably never look up on the net. However since I have the physical books on my shelf they are reminders of past interests that may be rekindled in the future.

I can't imagine disposing of my book collection but I wonder if future generations will have the same feelings about print. Why should we own a book or piece of music at all? If it is always available on the net there is no reason to collect. The popular music service Spotify gives you access to unlimited music online for a small fee per month so when will we see a similar service for e-books? This is discussed in an article I read in the Norwegian paper Aftonposten last week (read article Leie, ikke eie e-bøker - Borrow, don't own e-books, use Google Toolbar to translate). Sooner or later someone will start such a service. You won't download the books, they will simply be available online. Once you've read it you move on and no more bookshelves to buy.

Forget me not

Soon after writing my previous post on being able to filter what you write on social networks I read an interesting article in the New York Times, The Web Means the End of Forgetting. This discusses the digital trails we leave and the fact that whatever we write may come back to haunt us. Since everything is searchable whatever you put on to the net may be taken down and used in evidence against you. Online reputation is a fragile comodity and many have discovred the drawbacks of not thinking too hard before posting.

  by  snopek 

Identity boundaries are getting increasingly blurred as we reveal more of our work life to friends and relatives and more of our provate life to colleagues at work. Even if we do manage to filter our posts as I suggested earlier once you tell a few people something interesting you can assume they will pass it on. It's the first law of gossip and is even more true on the net.

There's even a service called Reputation Defender that promises to enhance your digital reputation by making sure that all the positive information gets top scores in a Google search and although the embarrassing stuff cannot be deleted they make sure it ends up at the far end of a search list. A sort of personal spin doctor. It's no longer only celebrities who need help with their media profiles.

One tempting solution mentioned in the article is that of being able to label content with a digital sell-by date after which the content will self-destruct, in true Mission Impossible style. I like that idea on social networks where you must choose how long you want a photo or text to be accessible. It would certainly free up storage space otherwise clogged up with digital junk. The problem is whether we can trust such a system. When we delete something on our computers we naively assume that they are gone forever but if a skilled IT technician gets hold of your hard drive it's amazing what they can dig up.

Dirt diggers will always find something in your past no matter how careful you are. We may have to get used to a web that never forgets and become more forgiving and tolerant of previous misdemeanours.

"Our character, ultimately, can’t be judged by strangers on the basis of our Facebook or Google profiles; it can be judged by only those who know us and have time to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses, face to face and in context, with insight and understanding. In the meantime, as all of us stumble over the challenges of living in a world without forgetting, we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever." 
New York Times, The Web Means the End of Forgetting

Filtering needed in social networks

If anyone from Facebook or Twitter should read this here's my suggestion for making social networking more versatile. The main problem is that when I send a tweet or post something on Facebook, all my "friends" can see it, whether they want or not. Why not let people group their contacts into different categories like family, close friends, colleagues, tennis club members etc and then let you choose which groups to send posts to? In this way I can avoid bothering work contacts with details of my family activities or boring my family with work-oriented comments.

A recurring discussion on edublogs is whether or not you should have students as friends on Facebook. There are advantages and disadvantages of this of course but we could easily solve the problem by enabling this kind of friend filter. Comments that are relevant to my student friends can be easily sent whilst material that is not relevant to them will not reach them. Nearly all of my tweets are about net-based learning but sometimes I'd like to use Twitter to comment on other interests. Either I send irrelevant coments to my e-learning colleagues or I have to create a second Twitter account. If I oould just choose from a quick menu which groups I want to tweet to the problem would be simply solved.

So what about it Facebook and Twitter?

The cost of anonymity

Roy Greenslade writes in The Guardian (Paper puts up a paywall for comments) that a US newspaper, The Sun Chronicle, has decided to impose a fee of 99 cents to comment on its net edition. They have seemingly got tired of anonymous abusive comments and ask readers to pay for the privilege of replying. You pay the fee by credit card and the name on the card is the name responsible for the comment. The idea is of course that if comments are traceable then people will be more responsible.

It could work but then again it could easily kill off all comments as even bona fide comments may be deterred by the extra work involved in commenting. The wreckers will simply move elsewhere but genuine readers could also be silenced. A relatively small proportion of sites that offer interaction actually have significant dialogue and it may not be wise to scare off your most faithful readers.

Anonymous abusive comments are one of the curses of the net. Stephen Downes has found a name for this, anonorage, in his comment on the Guardian story (Paper puts up a paywall for comments). Good discussions get destroyed and I know several people who have abandoned their websites in the face of incessant sabotage by spammers and wreckers. Free speech should of course include the right to make anonymous comments, though this right also includes the obligation not to sabotage others' free speech or integrity. I don't think the Sun Chronicle's move will change anything but there is a risk that unless we find smart ways of combatting the misuse of anonymity the web could drown in spam.

The future of education

Films about the impact of technology on education seem to be produced with ever increasing regularity and below is one of the most recent to emerge though it hasn't reached viral proportions like so many others. The basic message is that low-cost or free online university education is increasing just as traditional campus education costs are soaring.

However the existence of the low-cost online variety presupposes the existence of the campus university and that such institutions have the resources to pay teachers to offer the online variety. MIT offers excellent free course material but it all costs a lot of money to produce. Without the income from campus students and research staff the universities would be pushed to offer so much online content. Online education gives universities the chance to reach out to new student groups who cannot afford full-time education or who cannot consider moving to campus.

This new market attracts many new types of educational institutions who are more flexible than traditional universities. I'm sure we will see new niche players specialising in, say, examination or providing a learning environment but I can't see the traditional university structure being swept away any time soon. The video shows that alternative models of higher education are gaining ground. It's not a battle, it's simply increasing diversity and the various forms are dependent on each other. Unfortunately many traditional universities are finding it hard to recognize the potential of the "alternative" forms.

Back in Belarus

I've just spent an enjoyable and interesting few days in Minsk, Belarus, as part of a project between my university, Linnaeus University, and the Belarusian State University. This cooperation has been going on for a few years now (see earlier post on my first visit in 2008) and we are now at the stage where we're designing a joint net-based course in media management to be run in 2011 with students from both countries.

E-learning is still relatively new in Belarus where university education is still virtually synonymous with campus-based full-time studies. There are few areas in the country that are far from a university and the idea of universities offering distance courses for professional development hasn't really taken off, except for more traditional correspondence courses. In 2008 the university had very poor bandwidth on campus which made e-learning virtually impossible but now they're rolling out Moodle as a learning management system and I saw one course in mathematics which featured some nice simulation models. So the basic requirements are in place for this joint course.

One feature that has still to be resolved is how to distribute video lectures since most streaming video formats are blocked by the firewall to save bandwidth. The answer could well be to use YouTube which works fine. However most students in Minsk access the net from thier own computers at home where they often have more bandwidth than at the university; an unusual situation compared to many other countries. It's all a matter of finding common denominators between the two countries and adapting to suit them.

It will be interesting to see how the course works.We can expect a mix of very different student groups. In Sweden, net-based courses normally attract part-time students over 25 who have full-time jobs, family and don't live near the university they are studying at. These students will be studying with Belarusian full-time campus students most of whom are under 25. Plenty scope for increasing students' intercultural understanding and also, of course, plenty scope for misunderstanding. Students and teachers will need to be prepared to accept and adapt to other ways of working and to find common ground as much as possible.

Of course the course objectives and subject matter are the most important but on a course like this I would say that the side effects are almost as useful for the students' development. Learning to collaborate on the net with people of different age groups, nationalities and cultural backgrounds is undoubtedly a vital 21st century skill that will be of great use in the students' future careers. We just need to make sure the technology we use on the course is as clear and easy to use as possible. Work in progress.

Let's all be careful out there

We're all very worried about what our children are getting up to on the net. At least that's the angle that sells newspapers and magazines and turns up repeatedly on TV. There are indeed many things to be worried about on the net, as there are in society in general. The dangers our children face on the net are part of the real world we live in and as long as society works as it does those crimes will take place on or off the net.

However it's strange how we worry so much about what the kids are doing without examining our own behaviour on line. Adults are often less security conscious than their children - look at how many fall foul of get-rich-quick e-mails or other net scams (see article in New York Times). Many parents are worried simply because they don't know much about internet themselves and believe the scare stories they read. As a result we get calls for bans on net access in schools and other draconian measure instead of learning to use the net in a responsible manner.

This is covered in an excellent presentation by David Truss who advocates a more balanced and enlightened attitude to our children's net habits. They're actually doing just what we did when we were young but in a different environment. We watched too much TV, listened to too much pop music, were out too late without saying where we were etc etc. In some ways children were left more to their own devices in the past than today where the concept of the over-protective "curling parents" has become so common.

We all need to learn to work and play more responsibly on the net and that starts both at home and in school. Banning, blocking and dismissing modern communication is not the way forward.

'Parenting in the digital age' on slideshare

View more presentations from David Truss.

OER interview 5, Chahira Nouira

Another interview in my series on international perspectives on open educational resources and this time I've had a chat with Chahira Nouira who works with e-learning at the United Nations University, Vice Rectorate in Europe in Bonn, Germany. We've had contact via Twitter for about a year so it was a pleasure to have a real discussion with her. We actually wanted to interview each other so it ended up being a dialogue rather than an interview like the others in the series.

Interestingly all but one of the interviews I've recorded in this series have been with people I have got to know through Twitter so there's yet another testimony to the tool's usefulness at work.

In the interview Chahira talks about the UN University's work in spreading open learning, in particular in Africa and we discuss the hurdles faced by the movement in trying to get educational leaders to commit to openness.

Watch the interview (opens in a new window)
See previous interviews: Steve Wheeler (Univ of Plymouth), Nadhir Douma (e-Taalim), Stian Håklev (Peer2Peer Univ), Marit Synnevåg (Oslo - interview in Norwegian)

What do you expect for free?

I had a nice discussion today about the ever popular subject of free content and people's willingness (or not) to pay for net services. I find it hard to understand why some people go to such lengths to avoid paying for music or films over the net but are quite happy to fork out real cash for, say, extra magic powers in World of Warcraft, virtual clothes in Second Life or special ring tones for a mobile. At auctions people are willing to pay astronomical sums of money for any item associated with Elvis or Michael Jackson but don't want to pay for their music.

  by  Tracy O 

The key to price is clearly exclusivity. There is a finite number of shoes worn by Elvis and the market price i high whereas his actual music, being digital, can be copied infinitely and is therefore of little value. Exclusive digital material is rarer and generally belongs to commercially locked environments such as virtual worlds. Magic powers in WoW take a long time and considerable skill to earn and that creates a demand for short-cuts and market forces come into force.

In a world of branding and exclusivity where we are happy to pay enormous mark-up prices for the right brand, I wonder if we can really appreciate free content? If open educational resources becomes mainstream, as I hope, will we still be prepared to pay for some resources and if so what kinds of services could be so exclusive? Or will all digital content become free since it is so easily copied whereas hard copy and artifacts have a price tag?

Loose thoughts and no clear answers.

How social is Twitter?

I've been active on Twitter for about a year now and it has become one of the most important tools I have at work to keep track of news and opinions. I get tired hearing criticism of Twitter as mere trivia and pointless updates on where you are or what you're doing. Twitter is what you make it, like most applications on the net. Even if you do only use it to tell friends your everyday routines and activities isn't that really what the vast amount of human interaction is all about anyway?

I have built up a good list of people who I follow all of whom provide useful information. I decided early on that I wanted to use Twitter as a channel for gathering news and so I have deliberately avoided following people who only tweet about their private lives and where they are just now. I don't really mind who follows me as long as they're not spammers and I must admit that there is probably less than a 50% match between those I follow and those who follow me.

This mismatch is highlighted in a post on EduDemic, 72 Slides Prove why Twitter is not very social, which wonders how much interaction really takes place when so few follow each other. Is Twitter in fact more of a broadcast medium? A group of Korean researchers have produced the following presentation which, although highly detailed, shows that a mere 22% of all relationships on Twitter are reciprocal and calls into question the notion that it is indeed a social network.

Twitter is a great way of building a network and establishing contacts but once established I find it best to use other tools to start a discussion. Conversations in Twitter are rather clumsy and are best conducted as direct messages rather than as public exchanges. Direct messages are only possible between users who follow each other so some dialogues are broadcast to all which can be irritating to all innocent bystanders. So my conclusion is that Twitter is a great network builder but not particularly social.

What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?

View more presentations from Haewoon Kwak.

21st century education is more than just a smartboard

Following up on my last post I saw an article in the Washington Post, Some educators question if whiteboards, other high-tech tools raise achievements, that further confirmed the idea that simply investing in technology has little effect if you don't change the fundamental model of teaching. Smartboards in particular come in for criticism. Although they are marketed as interactive many people see them as simply reinforcing the traditional teacher role and that they fail to really engage students. Furthermore there is little evidence that these innovations will make any difference to students' grades.

  by  touring_fishman 

"There is hardly any research that will show clearly that any of these machines will improve academic achievement," said Larry Cuban, education professor emeritus at Stanford University. "But the value of novelty, that's highly prized in American society, period. And one way schools can say they are 'innovative' is to pick up the latest device." 

As long as we simply use new technology to reinforce traditional methods we won't see any significant effect on students' learning. It's time we started seeing new technology as opportunities for change instead of forcing them into traditional pigeon holes like "virtual classrooms", "virtual desktops" or "smartboards". Smartboards can certainly be effective for presenting information and integrating the web into the classroom but if we're really going to teach 21st century skills we need to look beyond the traditional paradigm.