Cloud Culture report published

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Last week Counterpoint, the British Council think tank, published the “Cloud Culture, the future of global cultural relations” pamphlet by Charles Leadbeater. In it Charles charts the cultural impact that the web has had in the last 15 years and looks ahead to how cloud computing will influence cultural developments over the coming decades.

“We have the potential to make available more culture and ideas in more forms to more people than ever: a digitally enabled, cultural cornucopia…..

…Yet this possibility, a vastly enhanced global space for cultural expression, is threatened by intransigent vested interests, hungry new monopolists and governments intent on reasserting control over the unruly web.”

Charles outlines the following threats to a truly open cloud:

* Censorship and the Power of Government
* Copyright:Old Media Seeks Protection from the Storm
* Cloud Capitalists
* Unequal Access to the Cloud

A thought provoking report and well worth reading.

Ten years of Technology

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This week Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian is blogging about the technology developments in each of the last ten years of the noughties. Today he’s up to 2002, with the rise and rise of Google and the rise and fall of Napster.

Similarly the BBC are looking back over the noughties and this morning I caught on radio 4 Defining the decade which today focussed on Google and the impact of the internet (the other two themes being climate change and terrorism).

Anyone fancy doing a post on the last ten years of technology in education?

Barriers to Innovation

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As a JISC Innovation Support Centre we often discuss the conditions needed to foster innovation, at local as well as national levels. So I was interested to come across this Futurelab literature review on Overcoming the Barriers to Educational Innovation by Kieron Kirkland and Dan Sutch.

Although the report focusses on innovation in schools, there is a lot that is directly applicable to universities and colleges. The authors group barriers into the following key themes:

“1. Innovation
2. Informal and social support structures
3. Formal environment
4. Risk aversion
5. Leadership
6. Shared vision
7. Change management”

I was particularly interested on the findings in the risk aversion theme:

“Core findings under risk-taking include:

* Innovation inherently engages in some degree of risk which can make individuals reluctant to innovate.

* Iterative change management cycles can mitigate some fears which impede innovation, such as fear of failure.

* To overcome risk aversion there needs to be motivation to innovate – this can be internal motivations, such as teachers wishing to improve the learning experience for pupils, or external motivations, such as pressure from above.

* Management style is core to supporting risk-taking behaviours, through encouragement and creating a sense of permission to engage in appropriate risktaking. This can be applied on a local level or on a wider national level.

* Institutional level practices have an important role in mitigating risk-taking, e.g. running pilot programmes and sound evaluation procedures.

* National level funding has a significant impact of risktaking behaviour.”

The last point is particularly relevant to the work of JISC emphasises “taking the risks that institutions would not normally take themselves” (JISC Draft Strategy 2010-2012).

However you could argue that it is actually individual projects who are taking the “risks”, and they will be under pressure both internally (from their management who endorsed their project) and externally (from JISC) to succeed.

The JISC Draft Strategy 2010-2012 outlines a framework for managing risk at a national level, perhaps projects too need more guidance on managing risk in their projects.

Bid Advice for Learning and Teaching Innovation Grants

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Writing a project proposal is a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process, so how do you maximise your chances of success?

In previous articles I’ve gathered some of the many JISC resources with advice and tips of success.

The current JISC call for Learning and Teaching Innovation Grants is accompanied by a review of the first two calls by Dr Neil Witt at the University of Plymouth. The success rate for the calls is alarmingly low, in Call 1 just 2 out of 82 proposals were funded and in Call 2 only 2 out of 85. So what has been going wrong ?

Dr Witt analysed the collated marks for the bids and found that the vast majoirty were “out of scope”. The criteria for being out of scope are listed below along side the number of bids that failed to compily in brackets.

1. The proposal must not duplicate existing JISC funded work. (Call1: 32%, Call2: 35%)
2. The proposal must not be part of the core institutional remit. (7%, 12%)
3. The proposal must not include the development or purchase
of learning material/learning content. (20%, 21%)
4. The proposal should not include the further development of an existing tool (10%, 6%)
5. The proposal should not include software and equipment purchase (13%, 13%)
6. The proposal must have the support of the lead institution and any partners. (18%, 3%)
7. The proposal must not be a direct resubmission of a previous bid to a JISC funded programme (4%, 2%)
8. Over length (this is an additional issue that will make a proposal Out of Scope)
(6%, 0%)

In the current call the JISC have adapted their documentation to address areas of weakness identified by Dr Witt. Proposers clearly need to set aside significant amounts of time to read the appropriate criteria and ensure that they meet them, so institutional managers clearly need to make space for staff to write bids. My concern is that while academic staff in universities are expected to bid for funding as part of their job, this is not always the case for support staff or staff in further education colleges.

The JISC executive are well aware of these problems and reviews like these as well as bid writing workshops can really help staff write successful proposals.

Can Twitter survive the hype cycle?

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An article by BBC’s Maggie Shiels charts the rise and rise of Twitter, but wonders about the viability of the service – which has yet to make any money.

I’m a fan of Twitter (working in a distributed organisation it keeps me in touch with what my colleagues are up to) and Maggie usefully traces the development of the service from humble beginnings to endorsement by Oprah Winfrey.

But questions about how companies like Twitter become profitable remain. And in this new age of “economic austerity” it seems likely that companies won’t have the luxury of such extended profit free beginnings.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8015777.stm

Twitter is fast becoming a part of daily life

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I just came across this post by Michael Calore at Wired about how developers are building applications for the home on the back of Twitter.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/twitters-hackab.html

The idea is that twitter enabled devices around your home and work can send you messages to tell you when the washing machine has finished the spin cycle – or (my favourite) when your plants need watering.

What would be nice is for my fridge to tell Tesco’s that we’ve nearly out of milk and put in an order for me….

Jim Fanning: The digital panopticon

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I came across this article on the Futurelab site in which Jim Fanning, an Assistant Headteacher of a secondary school discusses the use of VLEs in schools. I’ve read a lot about VLEs in HE and FE, but it seems that while VLE use may be on the wane in the tertiary educational sector, it could be on the rise in schools. But there some interesting challenges around using VLEs in our schools.

In the article Jim compares a VLE with a panopticon. If like me you’ve never heard the word before, Jim explains that it’s an idea proposed by the nineteenth century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, who was interested in prison reform.

A panopticon is:

“a prison building made up of many cells arranged around a central observation platform, from which one warden could supervise numerous prisoners at the same time. The inmates did not know when the wardens were present.”

So how does a panopticon relate to a learning environment?

Jim argues that:

“Despite the potential for learning platforms to herald a paradigm shift in teaching and learning, in the rush to adopt them schools may end up creating their very own digital panopticon, with the technology being used to monitor and control learning, rather than liberate it from the four walls of the classroom.”

One dimension of VLE use in schools that is just not an issue in HE, is that is some cases parents are encouraged to use VLEs to monitor “post lesson and homework tasks”. There is a real danger that pupils will view the learning environment as a monitoring surveillance tool which belongs to the system. Schools will have to be really creative in their use of VLEs to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/web-articles/Web-Article1118

Hans Rosling inspires ALT-C with educational animations

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I’ve just listened to the opening keynote from ALT-C 2008 via Eluminate. Hans Rosling Professor of International Health from the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm gave an inspiring talk about the work his company Gapminder.org has done to animate and present world health data in order to increase our understanding of world trends in health and economic growth.

One of the animated graphs Hans presented plotted the number of children per woman against life expectancy. Looking over the last 50 years he demonstrated how countries like China and India had now caught up with OECD countries in terms of life expectancy. With lots of other examples Hans showed just how engaging, educational and entertaining learning through animation can be. He discussed the huge possibilities for using statistical data to create educational mash-ups.

The Eluminate experience was pretty good, although it took a few minutes to set up – the video and audio were clear – and it certainly gave a flavour of actually being in the lecture theatre.

Keynotes like this are (in my opinion) what ALT-C does best. Access to Hans’s talk is available via Eluminate http://conference-weblog.alt.ac.uk/alt_conference_weblog/remote-access-to-altc-200.html. The other conference keynotes by Itiel Dror (Cognitive neuroscience at Southampton) on Wednesday (1400-1500) and David Cavallo (One laptop per child) on Thursday (1210-1310) are also being broadcast via Eluminate, tune in if you can.

An OpenSocial Foundation

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Yesterday Google announced that it was:

joining together with Yahoo! and MySpace in the creation of a non-profit foundation for the open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property. This foundation, modeled after the community-led and industry-supported OpenID Foundation, will seek to ensure that the technology behind OpenSocial remains implementable by all, freely and without restriction, in perpetuity.

It has also launched opensocial.org, as a home for the developer community and the OpenSocial specifications.

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/03/opensocial-foundation.html

via OLDaily