Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

How Mobile Cell Phones Change Everything When We Do

Will Richardson posts the above picture and asks

"how many educators look at that picture and think "OMG, puhleeeeese let me teach in that classroom!" (I suspect not many)".

He points out that with the mobile technologies already in our students' pockets we're probably not far off that level of ubiquitous kitting out in our schools already. He's right. But he's less right in implying that great teachers would want to teaching in that classroom.

Further on Will points out that often teachers and decision-makers can get hung up on the "what technology" question, rather than the "curriculum question". This might be a linguistic anomaly, but curriculum, to me, is deciding what we learn, when. It is important, but the most important peg on which we need to hang our thought is pedagogy, which is about how we learn. Teachers decide pedagogy, not administrators, authorities or Governments. That's why teachers discussing not tech, but teach, becomes ever more vital as technologies open up new ways to approach learning.

But linguistic anomalies are the stuff of learning, so I hope Will doesn't mind me challenging this one, and seeing what we really think it possible if we could encourage colleagues to move beyond "OMG puhleeeeese" statements.

The reason the picture presents a dubious message is that neither curriculum nor pedagogy have changed an iota in this learning space: it's about the same layout - with as many apples on laps - as a Victorian classroom would have appeared.

It's not an image to proud of, to smile at, to wonder at, or one I'd want to be in. It sums up the biggest challenge facing learning: too many educators look at that and think all of above.

What can we aspire to?

The other night Stephen Heppell pointed out the Education_2010 report that he, Graham Brown-Martin and other luminaries had pulled together in 1999, outlining what they thought technology would be doing for learning in 2010. The predictions and visions hinted at in that Garamond/Helvetica-shocker of a ClarisWorks document are not far off what we're close to as hurl towards the end of this decade. And that, in no short measure down to the work of the authors in promoting mobiles' inevitable conquest of learning spaces. The key message: learners will all have access to portable 'micros'. The micros, though, are maybe not the laptops or notebooks, even, that photos like the above one hint at.

Christmas Cracker Research

It's particularly apt as the decade ends with a supposedly "credit crunch Christmas" where iPhones and iPod touches, and cheaper but no-less effective smartphones with the major carriers, will be appearing under the trees of our youngsters (and, in what even I, a gadget fan, would consider a touch of spoiling, in their stockings).

In the UK the changes in equipment provision is already happening, and in the US it's going to follow really soon: the image of students locked to their laptops could change to a more human image of students talking to each other face-to-face, and using their mobile phones for research, reference and recording.

That change from the tech-oriented to the person-oriented could change, but it needs teachers, not tech, to make that change happen.

In the UK children have owned and used mobile phones at any kind of scale in schools (legitimately or otherwise) for about six years. I remember the Christmas when they all came back with them. The next year it was the mp3 player. This Christmas I bet it'll be the hyprid iPod Touch or iPhone (if they're lucky). What kids get for Christmas one year is nearly always the forerunner to what is really desirable in a few years' time. Where mp3 players were the hot item in 2003, the iPod shuffle and mini took until 2005 to hit the mainstream school audience. Where iPhones and iPod touches hit the Christmas pressie list in 2009, there will be something more profound and far more widespread in adoption in 2011.

If you want the real aficionados head to South Korea and Japan for a lesson in ubiquity, but still, I wouldn't bet on their curriculum or pedagogy having changed much as a result (and their relative educational success is more likely down to the insane hours students and their private tutors put in, compared to the average three weeks' per year absenteeism of Scottish students).

As the iPhone makes the mobile's northern American cousin, the 'cell', something more mainstream over the Pond, mobiles' learning potential is finally gaining more than a niche gadget audience's attention. It becomes even more palpable as the replacement cell phones are not of the simpler phone-text-image cariety, but, of course, the of smartphone stock. The pic below shows the scale of this: it's part of the half-a-million cells thrown out every day in the USA as people upgrade to the next, better model:

But the lessons learned about cell phone use (and handheld learning devices stuck in schoolbags) for learning in the UK, through trials, pilots and the generally higher adoption of mobile telephony here than over the Pond, risk being ignored. Most of the conversations being had in Will's monster 130-plus comment post are thinking through issues that have been thought through, put into action, analysed and researched in the UK as long as four years ago.

There's a monster post (or a book) in pointing to the work of the past decade and what it means for the next one. Many of those lessons are online, in places like the Wolverhampton Learning2Go project, whose initial work in mostly offline potential of PDAs was groundbreaking, or the Consolarium in Scotland which has pioneered games-based learning using devices often hidden away in school bags, not a pioneering effort in theory, I hasten to add, but in hard-to-initiate classroom practice.

Finally, though, it is heartening to see that the pedagogy of Higher Education institutions is changing. The above picture is still far from being out-of-date - for many campuses it's still light-years ahead. But iPhone-equipped students of Abilene university in the States have seen their lecturers change from information-transferal mode (that's what Google's for) to educator,  leader  and even developer roles in the lecture hall.

It’s like a mashup of a 1960s teach-in with smartphone technology from the 2000s.

Each participating Abilene instructor is incorporating the iPhone differently into their curriculum. In some classrooms, professors project discussion questions onscreen in a PowerPoint presentation. Then, using polling software that Abilene coded for the iPhone, students can answer the questions anonymously by sending responses electronically with their iPhones. The software can also quickly quiz students to gauge whether they’re understanding the lesson.

... And if students don’t understand a lesson, they can ask the teacher to repeat it by simply tapping a button on the iPhone.

This is the exception to the rule. Heck, it's in Wired. [Update: My good friend, former Pentagon man and superb Ireland-based educator Bernie Goldbach, blogs on what his students are doing with their Nokias, and the joy they have researching with them.] But a student in the story outlines why making these fundamental changes to access to technologies, whether that is giving it away for free (in Abilene) or just allowing students to bring out the panoply of kit from their Christmas 09 haul, is a no-brainer:

“They’re preparing us for the real world — not a place where you’re not allowed to use anything.”

BT & Google's Video Delivery Network for ISPs... and schools?

Media Guardian reports on a service due for launch in Spring 2010 from British Telecom (BT) and Google, allowing Internet Service Providers to host and stream video from their own networks, rather than using the network which is increasingly over-burdened by high quality streaming from BBC iPlayer, 40D, Hulu and, of course, Google's own YouTube and video services:

BT Wholesale is working with BT Retail and two other ISPs – understood to be Orange and Virgin Media – as well as the BBC, Channel 4 and Five, on a network called Content Connect. The idea behind the service is to store popular video content on an ISP's network, rather than relying on the internet, which is becoming increasingly congested, for the delivery of online video.

A logical extension for those in education who can turn the vision into reality, is that schools and education authorities are or can be Internet Service Providers to their institutions. In the same way as Scotland national intranet, Glow, hosts content on a network of cache servers throughout Scottish schools, a Local Authority or small country could ramp up the potential for downloading and sharing high quality video 'online' by not going online at all. Use overnight downtime to download prime learning content overnight to a local area network, and then deliver it quickly at the point of need during the day.

Previously, only large-scale enterprise could envisage this way of borrowing content on the cheap to serve it later at faster speeds. As a service provided by a larger scale programme such as that proposed by BT and Google, the economies of scale they will earn let the rest of us enjoy fast video at a reasonably priced premium.

Could it really change anything?

But, given that television was promised (wrongly) to be the saviour of learning in the 60s, how would you change things in your learning and your students' learning to take advantage of such an opportunity? Are classrooms full of plugged in kids, akin to the average open-plan office of iPod-entangled drones poking at Outlook, what we're after? Or would fast-streaming video be a significant enough innovation to change pedagogy, curriculum and school spaces beyond recognition?

Photo CC Kevin Steele

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

Lack of broadband for all, an implicit denial of full citizenship to some

My big boss at Channel 4 (spot the new website), Chief Executive Andy Duncan, gave a speech last week in anticipation of the Digital Britain report, the first part of which is released next week. In it he makes some key points about the importance of the public service intervention we are making on the web, mobile and gaming with 4iP, but also stresses why Government needs to act rather than talk about broadband access for all.

I still hear about the digital divide as a legitimate excuse for not embracing technologies and equally a reason for blocking and banning sites with which the Establishment of our education institutions don't agree or don't understand. It's the main reason for a propagation of 'safe' social networking sites and school intranets destined for tweens and teens who spend up to six hours a night unleashed in the 'real' online world, reaping the benefits this untempered activity has to offer. Making sure all citizens have access is a key "must-change" in 2009:

...We must have universal access to broadband services.  At the moment we rank fifth of the OECD countries for access, but in terms of speed we are some considerable way behind countries like Korea and Japan.   If we are to be a fully digital society, then every citizen must be able to participate.  Anything less would be an implicit denial of full citizenship to some.   For a household to be online is becoming as essential to participation in the life of society as having a TV and a phone.   And TV and phone are probably most important to those who are most disadvantaged.   The same should be true of broadband access.   In any case, the more universal a network, the greater its value.  Google, Yahoo, You Tube, Facebook, Bebo – they know that very well.  It’s even more true in a wider social sense as a common unifying element of citizenship.  And while many people - perhaps most people - will want to top up any basic provision by paying more for hi-speed or specialist equipment or content and services, just as they do with television today, access itself should be a basic right for everyone.
Full speech (pdf)   |   Listen to the speech online   |   Pic: Informitv

Clay Shirky in London: Group action just got easier

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.

Cross-posted at 38minutes

20 Ideas For Local Authorities To Engage With Web 2.0

A week ago I spent a whole day leading a session on behalf of Socitm, the Society of Information Technology Management, where we were exploring the impact new media could have in Local Authorities and other public bodies. Most of those present were from the world of corporate IT and, as someone presenting a variety of tools they were likely to be blocking on their home patch, I was a tad nervous about taking them on this particular learning journey.

I needn't have been. Having explained in broad terms the main drivers of change thanks to this technology, I was able to explore some more specific examples of public sector engagement with the social web, from eduBuzz in the domain of education, to several health-related initiatives of the NHS. We saw how technology is taking politics towards the realm of direct democracy, and explored the potential for some of the mobile, ambient and participative media that citizens are increasingly using in their day-to-day (social) lives.

We worked through the afternoon seeking practical, do-able actions that these IT managers could take forward, without the need for engagement of the senior management teams or specialist outsourced expertise. They relished the task, and came up with some superb ideas they could implement in days, rather than months or years. Some of them have even put them into action already: take a peek at Stratford's homepage, complete with Twitter updates. Here are the rest, coming to a local council near you:
What are the biggest challenges in your organisation?

1. Competitions for art work on Flickr
2. Mental health blog
   1. Teachmeet-style therapy group
   2. Video diary of experiences
3. Flickr/Google Earth mashups
   1. Things to do in the area, events, locations for recycling etc...
   2. Online estate agency for social housing
   3. Statistics in a glance mashup
   4. Graffiti tracking, crowdsourcing for finding the source of the 'tag'
   5. Mashups to reveal extent of disruption during strikes, accidents
4. Crowdsourcing FAQs on a wiki
5. Homeworkers can have real-time advice between 'virtual desks' (RSS feed to mobile)
6. Twitter for mass-collaboration during crises and a blog to quickly publish information and provide an instant feedback loop
7. Longitudinal e-consultation on complex issues
8. Using Flickr to provide stock photography to local press and council workers (like this)
9. Providing digital cameras to council gardeners to share the process and final result with enthusiasts and ciizens.
10. Twitter private groups for quick intranet publishing
11. Watchlist introduction for the PO, PR, Comms team
12. Culture change through a "from-the-top" blog by the CEO
13. Suggestion box for cost-effectiveness

Unleashing The Tribe: small passionate communities

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This is the 25-minute keynote, Unleashing The Tribe, which I delivered at the Tipperary Institute in May this year, a shorter version of the 90 minute marathon I was invited to give at Redbridge Council the same week. It's a "here's where we are now" on what makes communities tick online, on mobile, in face-to-face settings, and why understanding this is so important for learning, borrowing unashamedly from Clay Shirky, danah boyd, a plethora of the hundred or so research reports that have crossed my browser this past 12 months and all the conversations I've had, blog posts written. Not bad for less than half-an-hour of audio and slides.

Quirkology: there is no career path, but there is luck

Last week Bernie Goldbach took me out to dinner with about a dozen of his third year graduating students, all of them working with social media in some way or other (there was also a lovely first year there, who dared to come along to chat with a strange Scotsman and had to go to the trouble of getting a babysitter - much kudos).

The thing that got me: they thought that their careers would be plan-outable, that there was some pre-determinable path on which to travel in order to get their dream job. I tried to pop the bubble gently.

They're not alone. Last year NESTA commissioned Demos to produce the Ready For The Future? report, and it reveals how fair young people reckon the world is. 90% believe that if you work hard at something you'll get what you deserve, and only 30% think that getting on in your life involves any luck.

This is borne out further still. The majority of young people feel that qualifications are the most important factor, by far, in getting a job. In fact, they feel that being hard working is twice as important as being a good communicator and four times more important than being creative. Schools have never done as well, with constantly 'cleverer' kids getting their grades A-C. Parents are over the moon, with certificated 'proof' that their child has really been working as hard as they said they were. But have government policies over the years and around the world on attainment, attainment, attainment "emphasised what's measurable rather than what's important"? Bill, who's currently assessing said attainment, seems to think so.

Yikes - our economy depends on creative, innovative youngsters to thrive, yet they feel they're doing their bit by doing what they think school expects of them - getting good exam results at the cost, if need be, of creativity and communication skills.

No wonder employers complain bitterly about never having the personnel they need.

I want to get back to this idea, though, of having a set path, and that hard work alone will get you through this imaginary path and towards success. Speak to anyone who you might frame as a mentor and the words 'luck' and 'opportune moment' will crop up somewhere. Luck does play a part, serendipity leads to wonderful things and it's only the fact that some take that serendipity and do something with it that makes the difference between those who are 'lucky' and 'unlucky'. I've also started to get the distinct feeling these past few years that the more connected you are to more people, the more these serendipitous moments crop up. It used to be something to meet someone who knew someone you knew. With Facebook, it's not so uncommon to find you're related to them.

I'm also reading a bit of Richard Wiseman's Quirkology, where research showed that those who feel lucky generally are better off than those who feel unlucky. It's something I notice the minute I land to start working in the USA: people are incredibly confident in their ability to pull off something really good, regardless of how much or how little preparation, fundraising or graft they've done. It's often referred to as an "enterprising attitude" or "self belief". I think it's just that the people in the USA who I've been fortunate to work with feel that they've been lucky in life, and it rubs off on the amazing work they have done (of course, there's also plenty of hyperbole of mediocrity in good measure). People in Scotland have long held the belief that we are crap at everything, especially football (we're historically on the same level as the USA, did you know, and currently doing a lot better).

So, the message for those sitting their exams at the moment or about to set out on that non-existent yellow brick road of employment: do all the revision you can, work as hard as you can this summer in the real world and, of course, start feeling lucky.

Or, as the late design legend Paul Arden put it in the title of his superb book on creativity:

It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be
(The world's best-selling book by Paul Arden)

A comma's omission can make all the difference, eh? But it made me buy the book. And it is good.

Pic: Yellow Brick Road

Steven Spielberg hits Seesmic nearly now video conf.

Who says social media doesn't bring people closer, and even allow to you to connect with seriously famous and cool people those non-digiratis could only dream of?

Jemima was amongst many posing questions directly to Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford on Seesmic, the video discussion site from long-time ScotEduBlogger friend Loic Lemeur, ahead of the launch of the new Indiana Jones film. You can see some of the Q&A on the Guardian's PDA blog.

Nearly now video conferencing is something that I'll be experimenting with inside Glow, the national schools intranet here in Scotland, with some exciting names already booked up for live debates and nearly live explorations around the world. Hopefully you'll be up for experimenting, too, whether you're 'in' Glow or sitting outside it.

Whether LTS get Spielberg, though, is another matter. We've ended up having a different force with us.

Social media and ambient intimacy for software engineers

When you're designing a new piece of kit, a platform for the web or a nifty widget for Bebo, it's vital that you have an audience in mind, an understanding of what might be possible, and the ability to change your plans frequently without sacrificing the integrity of your project. That was the main message at my lecture to the BScs and BEngs at Napier University, Edinburgh, today.

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Why the 'users' are different

The generation of 21st Century 'users' would not appreciate the title. They are contributors, creators, co-creators, participants... 90% of 15-25 year olds have visited their social network in the past month, vast numbers of these Bebo Boomers using the platform in ways the platform engineers hadn't dreamt of.

Expertise comes in different forms from before. It won't be long before PhDs will be submitted on YouTube. Wine buffs don't need to wear particular clothes and visit stuffy vineyards; you can be an expert on your own blog, or have your passion facilitated and encouraged by the platform itself. You don't have to visit a pub to feel like you're a regular. You can join its Facebook group or take a peek at what's going on through its Flickr photo pool.

The main global shifts affecting innovation

With technology providing a means for consumers, users, participators to take part in the co-creation of products, services and knowledge (think Dell's community, Seesmic's relationship around product development with its users (as many follow it as it follows; its users are fanatical) and educationalists around the world, or Wikipedia, even), it means that competition in the space to have your voice heard and your service used has never been greater.

Daniel Pink notices what technology has allowed to happen, and sums it up with the three 'A's.

Asia

What happens in Asia won't take long to happen elsewhere. At the moment if it's mobile, it's happening, yet so few software engineers start out by thinking how they'll make a mobile app usable on the web. Instead, we see companies struggle to make mobile products from the web. The one exception to this: Twitter. Asia's not only a growing market but a global one: China will soon be the number one English-speaking country in the world, its top 5% of graduates numbering more than the whole population of the UK. They have more gifted and talented students than we have students. Change is on the cards, with tomorrow's teens facing over 29 jobs in their lifetime, which means long-term planning and big budget developments risk more failure for software engineers than small-scale, agile, flexible development.

Abundance

The need for being mobile has never been greater. What's this? Or this? Try this then. With 426,000 mobiles being chucked out every year in the States alone, the signal is this: mobile telephony and internet access is not only burgeoning, but consumers are becoming fans, and want to engage with the latest, most powerful kit. They need apps that push their devices and they will be ready to chuck the device before they chuck the web service that makes their mobile tick (think iPhone).

Automation

Automation of search has probably been the one most important automation to have taken place since the net was born. Everyone has become a cataloguer, but people still need help understanding the stories large amounts of data can tell. To prevent information overload, we need computer designers and engineers to come up with ever more ingenius ways to find and present information to the 'user'/co-creator. Jonathan Harris is getting there, showing us some degree of geography in the way we feel (the web's never been great at location or time) or time and pace in a photograph.

Automation of copy and paste has also meant that we have the potential to be more creative - or a lot less creative. It might be down to software engineers to design interfaces that make it more fun to be original than to be a copy cat. Adidas seem to  be having some success on Jumpcut with their sneaker remizes.

We also talked about the role of the engineer in adoption strategy, especially when such a strategy feeds back into the development of further fuctionality, and how privacy issues, which can sometimes be the death of a project, can lend itself to structuring social media projects for particular groups of potential participants. Case in point: ARGs and Voluntary Computing.

Ultimately, as we started, we saw that the potent power of the net is not in code, but in people. If we can code to bring people together, the right people at just the right time, then we release the potential. It's hard to do this, with most software engineers working in groups where the ideas and direction may come from mere mortals like myself ;-) Communication, therefore, remains a key skill, and one that is often underdeveloped until the engineer is summoned to Demo and given a course by Shel. I love the way some developers express themselves in presentations at the likes of Demo or BarCamp, or in YouTube videos: this SecondLife development is more beautiful in its development than in the final product, I'd argue.

The easiest way to communicate with potential clients, employers or programming peers? A blog. In this case, if you're developing software for the web, for the social web at that, there's no excuse to be towards the end of a university career with no means to market yourself and build contacts in the slightly less cossetted world out there.

Software developers need to jump on every bandwagon going, to see if it's headed anywhere (thanks, Mike). They need to make sure that, using the tools of the ambiently intimate, they are at the front of the minds of everyone who matters to them now and into the future.