Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

edu.blogs.com in Wall Street Journal. So what?

A fascinating and personal insight into the Long Tail in action. Earlier this week I appeared alongside illustrious company in the Wall Street Journal. However, I can't even find the referrals from there in the first few pages of my stats, with links from Google search, other educators and, lo-and-behold, Twitter, knocking the American giant of the printing press off into stat result obscurity.

There are, as usual, a lot of people typing the address into their browsers directly, but no discernible difference from normal numbers. Indeed, there's even been a 400 person decline in my subscription numbers since starting work at Channel 4 (evidently there's a great mistrust of thoughts coming from those who turn to the dark side of the media), a figure that's not buoyed by the one-hit clickers of the WSJ readership.

Conclusion? It's more worthwhile cultivating online and offline relationships with people than relying on large institutions' pull of strangers with no tangible digital breadcrumbs of their own. Here endeth the lesson.
Pic from Superamit

Looking two times the distance back to forecast the future

"Hunt for Bin Laden: Experts Agree: Al Quaeda leader is Dead or Alive". Yossi Vardi's photoshopped CNN reportage was certainly amusing but was, above all, a completely accurate forecast. What forecasters mustn't do is try to eliminate the uncertaintly from our futures.

Paul Saffo, formerly of the Institute of the Future, shares some of his secrets and insights from his main job: forecasting the future.

The Information Revolution is over. This is the Media Revolution
Everything in the knowledge and information world is uncertain. The information revolution is done, gone, in the past. We are now gripped by a media revolution - media is information that goes deep down and makes a difference in our life. It's also a shift within this field, from mass media to a very strange new world of personal media. Indeed, it's what my new job is all about - making the convergence of media count and make amplification have a new, almost reversed sense.

Even the information devices of old are now media devices. 1998 saw the first ring tone sold, and 2005 it had become a $2b business, accounting for 10% of the music business. Cell phones are entertainment media devices that happen to be communication devices. They are not information devices.

As Jane McGonigal, still at the Institute of the Future, has repeated: you need to look back twice as far back to see what's ahead. It might not be repeated, but the future will rhyme with it. If we peer back to the 1950s we see huge experimentation in mass media, in ways the television could be used, developed, enhanced. Today's use of the web is probably not even a bump on the landscape compared to what we will use our discoveries today for tomorrow.

When television emerged in the 1930s, it took some 20 years until it began to take off. Time-sharing (through email) took time from its first developments in the late 70s to become accepted in the 90s. Technology takes time to take hold, but in recent history technology is taking less and less time to make an impact:
This means that email and internet apps are nowhere near the peak of their activity.

Never mistake a clear view as a short distance
The challenge for those trying to predict the future is that, at one stage on the uptake curve you're made to look foolish as no-one joins you in the adoption of the technology. After a while, you give up on that bandwagon and think about what is worth betting your efforts on next. Just as you give up on it everyone else starts to adopt. You therefore look foolish twice over. I've written off many a fashion faux pas on that S curve theory.

SecondLife is one such maligned technology - I've managed to hit the middle part of that S Curve about a dozen times in the past three years, and have kept on it; something's afoot in this space. Paul believes it has a smell of the 20 year S Curve in it. He mentions the Cisco SecondLife meetings that my now-Cisco colleague John has talked about before. Likewise, in the nineties publishers would have scoffed if you said that something like the MacBook Pro Nano would make reading books online or on a computer doable - and enjoyable.

The changing nature of innovation
The next big thing is not the semantic web - it's sensors and robots
1950s TV - Broadcast
1980s Time-sharing - Email
1990s Cient sharing - WWW
2000  P2P - Napster
2010  Sensors - Smartifacts

Sensors will lead to smartifacts, robots that can make life easier, more enjoyable, more connected... Think of the current indicators: Roomba, the first robots to kill a human in the war on terror in Yemen in 2002, Nabaztags, robots that drive cars more safely than us... The indicators are already in place, though I think we're probably missing it for the immediate ideas and opportunity that the web is offering in 2008.

We're moving from TV to the web, from the living room to everywhere, from watching and consuming to participating and creating, from few and large organisations to many and small individuals.

We are moving at a tumbling rate from the Consumer Economy where buying and selling rule, to, markedly in the past two weeks, an economy where there are new actors in a Creator Economy. Google makes the perfect example of the success of the Creator Economy. It costs $0 to subscribe to Google, the usage charges are $0 and every time we use it we make it better. That last part is the cost - our search string contributes to the richness of what, in days past, would have been the Manufacturer. The question is, do we care if the $ cost is zero and the [heart] cost is information?

One forecast is looking a dead cert: the future's looking like one heck of a ride.

Quinn's photo of Paul Saffo.

Paul Saffo speaking at the ebic Thought Leader conference, Berlin, at which I am later speaking on the futures panel.

I met the Walrus: John Lennon on participative culture

I'm making some Beatles references in this morning's keynote at the Alberta 1-2-1 Summer Institute in Calgary. In my morning aggregator rummage I found this gem, an animation produced in the space of nearly 40 years, by a child who became a man. For me, many of the messages about achieving peace through the equipment and space of the Establishment could be translated into the kind of daily struggles some of us have in our domains.

For me, it's trying to inspire people to make a little extra push in the name of innovation, learning something new or make a little trouble to see where it goes. Take five minutes out to watch this and let me know if you see any parallels with your way of thinking, working, living. From YouTube:

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatles fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message.

Don't send out a press release to say you landed on the moon

Over the past three years at Learning and Teaching Scotland I've seen significant change in the way things have been done, largely thanks to the humble blog and the voices behind them. By pressing the need for authenticity in what's said, rather than some glossy, postcard format marcoms message ruling us all, we've seen the beginnings of a healthy little blogosphere in LTS Towers, both externally and, in true iceberg fashion, internally, under the glossy surface.

There are undoubtedly non-believers in all this authentic-voice-stuff that still remain (we're a Government body, this project is too big to allow the simple message we've created to leave people's minds, we need to make sure people use the correct acronym [is it CfE, aCfE or ACE?]) but, by and large, especially since this summer's Inspiration Sessions and Mike Coulter's work in-house, there is an ever increasing chance that if you want to find out more about the people behind the policy, the implementation, the ideas or the websites, that they have a blog. You can converse with - no offence intended - the horse's mouth. From professional development experts to web services, the magazine to the gaming guys, the geeks to the boss, it's covered. If you want to see behind the scenes at the Scottish Learning Festival, be our guest, and see the stand designs, the podcast preps and even take a look at how well (and not so well) the Festival is doing. LTS is well on its way to finding and sharing its voice.

And here's the crunch. People I know will object to this blog post, as they have objected to so many others. It makes them uncomfortable. They wonder if I'm talking about them in the para above. Or am I? Good. It's vital that the politic that got me a job with the education agency remains, for a month or two more at least, in people's heads: all anyone wants from a non-governmental body, a government, an organisation, a company is complete and utter authenticity. No compromises. No jargon. No marcoms crap that gets in the way of what really matters: "what are you doing to help me, and how can I help you?"

If you're still left thinking this is rubbish, and that traditional 20th Century corporate communications have a place in this connected world, then go read Seth Godin's superb rundown of NASA's best ever spokesperson, and then think about what watchlists need to be created, press releases junked and bloggers befriended. Happy blogging, folks.

Pic: Neil Armstrong

Interactivity in gaming: are we there yet?

I've managed to get along to the gaming for learning day of the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, a fest not about interactivity in its broadest sense, but about gaming. I'm wondering whether the organisers have built in a bit of slack for what we all know will make the games industry more successful in the long term. The title of the event offers huge potential to expand a rather quiet conference floor, and the word "interactive" offers more scope for gaming than the public exhibition space would have us believe.

Though social interaction through gaming can be seen oozing through education projects of the kind we see coming out of the Consolarium, most of this interaction is engineered by the combination of a superb teacher, guidance from a full-time gaming specialist and the stamp of approval from the national education agency. The interaction is not engineered by the commercial, off-the-shelf game itself, designed instead for entertainment for oneself rather than entertainment with others. The interaction is coming from the framework of teacher, classroom and planning. The one relatively recent and significant exception to the rule would be the Wii.

Where games are used in learning, there is significant social interaction whose scaffold is the teacher - the way the students play the game, the way they talk about the game, the tasks they undertake and then the way they reflect about their learning. The teacher plans and prepares the play of the class.

Education does social interaction
Take Kim Applin's use of Endless Ocean at Meldrum Primary School: a game that provides a rich graphical interest is used much the same as Rylands and co would use Myst for creative thinking and writing. They record species they find on their 'dives', write about what it feels like to dive to the coral reef, design their own fish, make Crazy Talk animations of their creations. It's great. But all the support, ideas for taking the game for learning and the outcomes are done within the context of a curriculum, which Kim refers to repeatedly, and it is a teacher, not the students, choosing the rough direction of travel for interactivity.

Education has done well to use computer games or video games to enhance or create new contexts for learning, but the methods and outputs, though digitised, more varied and of increasingly higher production values, hold much in common with the process and output of the primary school classic Granny's Garden, which I was playing in 1986. Students play game, in a group or individually or both, teacher structures activity around social interaction between students, students create objects and (mostly) linear stories, illustrations, movies, iStories, podcasts. If this is, rather simplistically put, the process we see re-modeled in 2008, where can we take things in 2009 and beyond, to encourage some truly student-led and student-structured interactivity? Moreover, where can we take commercial or online games that are played outside the classroom, with no teacher to scaffold activity?

(Un)interaction in the 'real world'
In the real world, outside school, it's going to be rare that kids get as much out of their games in terms of social interaction and, in turn learning. Even forgetting the learning argument for the moment, the "ticky box" approach to applying games to learning and curriculum, we can see that the games industry has, by and large, left social interaction to the domain of the educator, the enthusiastic parent or precocious child. After all, is 10 seconds of abuse of our competitors before playing Halo really interaction? Is text chat with strangers during our F1 racing really interaction?

Truly engaging, long-term interaction with endless opportunity to build upon requires something more profound, more complex and hard-to-grasp to happen: people need influenced by other people (not by the computer-generated, limited characters), actions need to be completed with other people (not with a game's cues). Social interaction from within the game (and not through the imagination of a teacher and his/her students) is where the games of the future will find themselves. ARGs may not be the elixir (or they might be) but they have more of the kind of true inherent interaction I'm talking about than any other gaming interaction we can see.

The challenge for those working in education is threefold. Truly interactive gaming such as ARGs, from a player's perspective, are hard impossible to predict and can't be preplanned to fit in with curricular goals. They are incredibly challenging to author, arguably more so than recreating a 3D copy of something we've already played, on a game-making application like Missionmaker. Finally, they require the use of social and mobile tools that are misunderstood and maligned in most education circles: social networks, blogs, video podcasting sites and, above all, cell phones.

This is where gaming, and particularly gaming for learning, has to go eventually. I'm heartened when self-confessed glutton-for-punishment Susan Yeoman ends her talk on educational uses of gaming by pressing the importance of pubishing and sharing output from game-playing with as wide an audience as possible on the web. Sharing, listening to feedback, collaborating and republishing ideas is much tougher than picking a game off a shelf which has rich graphics for stimulating creative writing or which trains our brains in mathematics or foreign languages.

Above all, really making games social within and of themselves further asserts the roles of learners, not teachers, as the ones who direct and plan learning, regardless of whether it 'fits' into a curricular plan. If it works, with the complicity of talented teachers and informed parents, then we really are headed towards something of excellence.

Thwarting anti-social behaviour on Bebo

Tayside Police in Scotland have taken to Bebo to find the sources of anti-social behaviour, questioning 182 young people in a real-life swoop on virtual activities. The sources  of the problems are not, of course, the social network sites themselves but rather the aggressive individuals using them to coordinate the purchase and illegal consumption of alcohol, drugs and who coordinate bullying.

"When we started looking, what became clear was that young people aged from very early teens through to late teens and young adulthood were involved in open displays of aggression and other unacceptable behaviour, apparently fuelled by drink in many cases.
"This has been about being intelligence-led from the start to tackle a long-standing problem of anti-social behaviour, youth disorder and under-age alcohol abuse, something our communities tell us is their biggest concern - which was being driven by young people's knowledge and use of the internet."

Personally, I think this is about the right balance - tackling the mechanisms that cause crime. But I wonder if anyone in the education world, the marketing world or who's outside any of these realms has a view as to whether these profiles, some of which will be 'private', have been misused.

Thanks to Brian for the link who, it seems, has lost the blogging bug since buying his own pub. Who can blame him ;-)

Why Glow isn't Bebo, and why it will probably succeed

It doesn't take much digging around to know that I have a passion for finding out what makes social networks, online communities and the people on them tick, and learning from this to help influence how communities and groups might be built around learning. It's become a core part of my work with Learning and Teaching Scotland, whether the project is small, medium or large scale, an unconference, an online blogging platform or a national intranet.

In my latest BBC Learning column I explore the huge growth of Bebo over the past couple of years, resulting in its impressive sale a couple of months ago, and what we might learn from it in making Glow a success in years to come. There are a few community-building challenges which have begun to be worked through by the Glow team and by the leading Local Authority lights in the Glow roll-out. I'd love to know what they have to say about this SNS angle on what is effectively a highly organised attempt at community building.

The last column on mobile learning got a fair few comments from around the world, which were fascinating in their different takes on such an emotive subject. This post might be a little closer to (my) home, but I hope that doesn't stop readers in Scotland and further afield having a good ol' debate about how Glow's going to see its success form. And while we're at it, what would success for Glow look like? Comments are open.

If real life were like Facebook...

...it may not be worth living. Idiots of Ants have an amusing sketch that shows how anyone who says online social interactions "are just like face-to-face friendships" aren't living on the same planet as the rest of us.

Meet my friend Noel: global explorer and NYC cabbie

When you've spent nearly a year traveling the world, to every continent, who wouldn't want to be a NYC cab driver?

Noel "noneck" Hidalgo is a bit of an enigma, and I was lucky enough to work with him earlier this year in the preparation for the LIFT08 Open Stage. At that point he had just come back from his On The Luck Of Seven project:

for seven months, he will traverse the seven continents, dive into the seven oceans, and attempt to visit the seven ancient wonders of the world.

He used a variety of social media to capture his adventures: video and audio podcasts, and amazing Flickr photo feed, a wiki to coordinate his travels, couchsurfing to coordinate his bed/sofa/floor arrangements, Dopplr to let his friends know he was coming, Twitter to keep his news up-to-date, and Facebook to pull it all together.

Well, he's at it again, life-blogging, filming and Flickring his weird and wonderful life as a newbie New York cab driver, from shaving off his fine mane of hair for the job, learning the ropes and taking the test, the hidden costs, and heading out for his first day in his first cab. You can listen to him interviewed on NPR's Bryant Park, too.

For me, it's a great example of the interest that's in everyone's daily lives, when you look carefully enough. Would your students know how to write interestingly about what might be considered 'mundane'? And why do companies still persist in telling me that most of their business is not 'of interest' to customers, and therefore not for blogging/filming/recording, when most people would have said that a taxi driver's life wasn't of interest to them when they were trying to get from A-Z?

Noel's just finished his first week on the job and is discovering just how much cabbies make - about $10 per hour. He's certainly changed my tipping patterns:

now the road journey begins. over the next few months, i will continue to push myself to do things i've never done - see things i would never dream - fulfill the promise made to family and friends from around the world - and figure out a way to worship the all mighty dollar in ways only a hard working capitalist can. "welcome to my cab. where would you like to go?"

Well, Noel, if you're able to pick me up from JFK on July 6th for the Empire, I'll bring the Leica... ;-)

A new way for kids to know their mum is picking on them

My brother and I are frequently updating our friends (and mum) about our movements through Twitter. Often she replies. Her Tweetcloud, a grouping of all the words she uses most commonly in her messages, reveals, though, that one brother (ewanmcintosh) is getting more nags than the other (nmcintosh).

Yet another reason for today's youth to take new technologies at their peril...