Idle Thoughts on Micro-Consultations

Last week, Steph Gray announced yet another innovative way of trying to engage people in public consultations in his blog post Your starter for ten. The piece describes a scheme in which a series of pub quiz style “killer facts” are pulled out of a current consultation document on consumer rights and credit and then represented in a quiz format along with why you should care/what the consultation is seeking to do to address the issues raised by each quiz question. (You can find the quiz from a link on here: Government action to secure a better deal for consumers.)

This idea, of microchunking particular elements of a consultation and then trying to use these microchunks to draw people into commenting on a consultation document, is one that Joss Winn and I have casually explored in the context of WriteToReply. In that case, we discussed whether or not we should pull out intriguing facts or potentially contentious questions that we could then tweet, along with a link to the appropriate part of the consultation document, in order to entice people into commenting, either directly on the WriteToReply site, or by remote commenting (that is, posting a blog comment or tweet that links back to a particular paragraph on the WriteToReply site site that we can then track via a Trackback).

(As part of this, we imagined creating a list of ‘nuggets’ pulled from consultation docs as we imported them into WordPress; it strikes me now that if we did have such a list, we could set up a twitter account for each consultation that could be run on a ‘daily feeds’ like basis – whenever anyone subscribes, they start to receive tweets @’d to them, according to a personal schedule starting at the moment they follow the consultation, as well as more general broadcast tweets?)

So for example, here are a couple of tweets that we sent out yesterday in support of a new consultation doc on WriteToReply about funding local and regional news (Sustainable independent and impartial news):

One thing to note here is that rathr than linking to the actual paragraph that contains the question, which is what we’d normally do, these tweets link to paragraphs that preview, and provide the context for, the questions. So if you follow the link, you are lead into the body of the consultation document, and if you read on you then come to the question included in the tweet. That is, the tweet provides the question that sets the contest, the link leads through to the part of the consultation that provides the context for the question, and then to the question as it appears in the consultation doc.

Also on Twitter, Joss and I fell into a conversation with Steph and Richard Stirling about the different audiences for consultation docs and what the appropriate means of publication are for those different audiences. So for example, Steph suggested “Consultations have multiple audiences. Suspect downloadable PDFs actually not bad for policy folk. But for public?” [ref], which was backed up by Richard: “I agree with @lesteph’s point. As a policy person I often want to read the whole doc – not sections. PDF works.” [ref].

However, if the aim is to reach outside the policy wonks and the committed lobbiests/interest group members, then I suspect we need smaller ‘headline’ chunks, or atomic parts of the consultation document, to pull people in to the consultation. (Also, we may learn something form the journalists here, and the way they construct stories to lead people in, or at least, give them some of the facts – that is, facts they can misquote in the pub later! – up front.)

There are dangers with the headline approach, of course, as the ’simplistic’ tweeted questions shown above suggest… At the simplest reading, they just solicit a trivial yes/no answer, rather than an informed comment. But bear this in mind too – those questions were taken from the consultation document itself.

A further thing that’s interesting to note is how the consultation document is actually constructed. The ‘argument’, such as it, and the issues that the consultation wishes to be taken into account, are used to preface the actual questions (see the sections on Potential Sources of Top-Up Funding or Protecting the BBC’s Funding for a couple of examples).

That is, some issues a presented, and then the question is asked. But how likely is this to work as an engagement strategy? A cold start conversational strategy would probably be more likely to start with a question, followed by a discussion (or argument) and an agreement to disagree.

So on the WriteToReply “plural news” consultation dashboard, we have started to explore how we can hook people into the consultation, first through a re-presentation of the consultation questions as simple polls:

and also by using the questions to lead in to some of the discussion that actually appears before the questions in the original consultation document:

We’ve also started looking at pulling related news stories in to the dashboard, in the first instance from the Guardian using the Guardian OpenPlatform API, to try and embed the consultation in a wider context:

There is an issue of circularity here, of course – the news reports presented to date stem largely from responses to the original consultation call, so rather than setting the consultation in context, you could argue they are just responses to it.

Cf. also the approach taken particularly on BBC sites where full articles on a government documents are often backed up with a link to the original document:

But we have to start somewhere, and we are, after all, making this stuff up as we go along. If nothing else, we are exploring how to re-balance the presentation of the consultation doc and associated news stories compared to the mode of presentation used by the BBC et al.

And finally (and slightly off topic!), note that we’re also using WordPress feed to pull in both the content of the report and the comments from the WriteToReply republication of the original consultation document:

However, whilst we can pull the content of the report into the dashboard via an RSS feed, the paragraph level links and links and comment links are not passed though the RSS:

(I suspect this is because the linking is managed by the CommentPress theme? Joss – maybe we need to look at adding paragraph and “comment here” links to the RSS content too?)

PDFs Do Your Licensing For You…

That is:

PDF, a digital form used to represent electronic documents, allows users to exchange and view the documents easily and reliably, independent of the environments in which they are created, viewed and printed, while preserving their content and visual appearance. [PDF Format Becomes ISO Standard]

No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Hyperlocal Twitter Trends

Just by the by, I idly tweeted last week along the lines of “does anyone know of a twitter trends service that identifies trending topics within a particular region or locale?”.

I didn’t receive any links to such a service at the time (and didn’t build the service myself…) but it strikes me that this could be a really useful hyperlocal news service?

An alternative might be to find ‘trending locations’ or ‘trending places’ rather than trending hashtags or topics, so if there is a sudden flurry of tweets in a particular area, it could get flagged (does Twitter this anyway with its trending topics?).

The locus of the trending regions need not be limited to ‘a circle within fifty miles of a point’ either; they could (with lots of computing power;-) be points along a line, such as a road, for example.

As an asymmetric follower type (I have many more followers than people I follow on Twitter), it might also be handy to be able to see trending topics across the people who follow me, just in case the sampled population that I do follow aren’t a fair sample of the people who follow me…

Just a thought… now back to the jet lag :-(

[See also: Mapping Realtime Events on Twitter and this Simple Embeddable Twitter Map Mashup]

Deep Link into BBC iPlayer Content

One of the really handy things about Youtube is the ability to share bookmarks that “deep link” to a particular point within a video (e.g here’s Google having a dig at Microsoft; the URL? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5aJAaGZIvk#t=29m10s, which should start the video playing 29 minutes 10 seconds in. That is, just add something like #t=29m10s to the end of the Youtube video page URL to start the video playing that far in).

A similar service is offered on podcast material published through the wonderful IT Conversations, that lets you deep link in to a particular part of an audio file, which is great for sharing audio quotes and, err, messing around with: IT Conversations samples trigger pad;-)

Anyway, anyway, yesterday I saw this:

which means you can now deep link in to iPlayer content :-)

As with the Youtube deep linking, if you know the URL pattern, you can can create your own deep links on the fly (just add, ?t=21m45s, for example, on to the end of the URL to start the programme playing 21 minutes 45 seconds in.)

Something else I thought was interesting – the shared link is actually a BBC short link. So for an example, this is the sort of link you are given to share:

http://bbc.co.uk/i/l9n18/?t=13m55s

which then resolves to something like this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00l9n18/Psychoville_Episode_1/?t=13m55s

I’ve raised the issue before now (in conversation with HEI internet services people, rather than through blog posts, I think?) about whether HEIs should run their own short code services (maybe as a Library service), but it’s always been shot down as being an extra hassle that we don’t need to worry about. (I always saw it as an opportunity for providing a couple of value add services: 1) providing a persistent web identifier that could act like a DOI; 2) providing a level of indirection (as in the case of a DOI) that might help as part of an archiving or “archival redirection” project – e.g. in the case of content moving and URIs changing (because they do change).)

Anyway – it seems as if the BBC think running their own short URI service is a good idea.. It’d also be useful to know if the short URI will permanently map to the same full URI, or whether it will support a more arbitrary form of resolution, e.g. maybe hooking in to services like URIPlay?

PS sort of, but not really, related, see also: Open University Podcasts on Your TV – Boxee App

Open University Podcasts on Your TV – Boxee App

Over the weekend, a submission went in from The Open University (in particular, from Liam GreenHughes (dev) and some of the OU Comms team Dave Winter in Online Services (design)), to the Boxee application competition (UK’s Open University on boxee).

For those of you who haven’t com across Boxee, it’s an easy to use video on demand aggregator that turns your computer into a video appliance and lets you watch video content from a wide range of providers (including BBC iPlayer) on your TV. Liam’s been evangelising it for some time, as well as exploring how to get OU Podcasts into it via RSS’n'OPML feeds (An OU Podcast RSS feed for Boxee).

(For those of you who prefer to just stick with the Beeb, then the BBC iPlayer big screen version provides an interface optimised for use on your telly.)

As well as channeling online video services, and allowing users to wire in their own video and audio content via a feed feed, Boxee also provides a plugin architecture for adding additional services to your Boxee setup. The recent Boxee competition promoted this facility by encouraging developers to create new applications for it.

So what does the OU Podcasts Boxee app over and above a simple subscription to an OU podcasts feed?

A pleasing, branded experience, that’s what.

So for example, on installing the OU podcasts app (available from the Boxee App Box), an icon for it is added to your Internet Services applications.

Launching the application takes you to an OU podcasts browser that is organised along similar lines to the OU’s Youtube presence, that is, in terms of OU Learn, OU Research and OU Life content. The Featured content area also provides a mechanism for pushing editorially selected content to higher prominence. (Should this be the left-most, default option, I wonder, rather than the OU Learn channel?)

In the Research area, a single level of navigation exists, listing the various episodes available:

Th more comprehensive Learn area organises content into topic basic based themes/episode collections (listed in the right hand panel) with the episodes associated with a particular selected theme or collection displayed in the left hand panel. Selecting an episode in the left hand panel then reveals its description in the right hand panel (as in the screenshot above).

So for example, when we go to the OU Learn area, the Arts and Humanities episodes are listed in the left hand area (by default), and available collections in the right.

We can scroll down the collections and select one, Engineering for example:

Episodes in this collection are listed in the left hand panel, and further subcollections in the right hand panel (it all seems a little confusing to describe, but it actually seems to work okay… maybe?!;-)

Highlighting an actual episode then displays a description of it.

Selecting a program to play pops up a confirmation “play this” overlay, along with a link to further information for the episode:

Both audio and video content can be channeled to the service – selecting a video programme provides a full screen view of the episode, whilst audio is played within a player

The “Read More” option provides a description of the episode, as well as social rating and recommendation options:

Finally, a search tool allows for content to be discovered using user selected search terms,

If you search with an OU course code, and there is video on the OU podcasts site from the course, the search may turn that course related video up…

This wouldn’t be a OUseful post if I didn’t add my own 2p’s worth, of course, so what else would I have liked to have seen in this app. One thing that comes to mind is a seven day catch-up of OU co-pro content that has been broadcast on the BBC (or more generally, the ability to watch all OU co-pro content that is currntly available on the BBC iPlayer). I developed a proof-of-concept demonstrator of how such a service might work on the web, or for the iPhone/iPod Touch (iPhone 7 Day OU Programme CatchUp, via BBC iPlayer), so under the assumption that the Boxee API can provide the hooks you need to be able to play iPlayer content, I’d guess adding this sort of functionality shouldn’t take Liam much more than half-an-hour?!;-)

I also wonder if the application can be used to preserve local state in the form of personalisation information? For example, could a user create their own saved searches – and by default their own topic themed channels? Items in such a feed could also be nominally tagged with that search term back on a central server, if, for example, if a user watched an episode that had been retrieved using a particular search term all the way through?

To vote for the OU Boxee app, please go to: vote for your favorite apps, RSVP for the boxee event in SF.

PS the OU Podcasts app is not the only education related submission to the competition. There’s also OpenCourseWare on boxee, which porvides a single point of entry to several video collections from some of the major US OCW projects.

PPS it also turns out that KMi have a developer who’s currently working on a range of mobile apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch, Android phones and so on. If any OU readers have ideas for compelling OU related mobile apps, you just may get lucky in getting it built, so post the idea as a comment to this post, or contact, err, erm, @stuartbrown, maybe?

PPPS Now I’m not sure how much time was spent on the app, but as the competition was only launched on May 5th, with a closing date of June 14th, it can’t have been that long, putting things like even the JISC Rapid Innovation (JISCRI) process to shame…?!;-)

Pandering to the News Cycle, or Enriching It? (aka a roundabout palaver way of embedding OU podcasts in a WordPress blog)

Stephen Downes picked up on a recent post of mine (Guerrilla Education: Teaching and Learning at the Speed of News [OLDaily] with the response:

“[S]hould we as academics be engaging with the news cycle in order to deliver informal, opportunistic ‘teaching’ at the point of need?” My answer: no. Not when ‘need’ is defined as ‘powerful’ or ‘influential’. Because then it’s not teaching, it’s just lobbying, or worse, pandering.

Okay – so here’s slightly more worked out example of one of the approaches I have in mind. In the original post, I mentioned “[a] sleeper podcast from John Naughton [that] picked up significant amounts of traffic … from the 40th anniversary of the internet.”

Here’s what John wrote (The Internet at 40)

From ‘Hot News’ on the Apple site this morning:
The Internet turns 40, June 9, 2009
You’re so used to paying bills, getting your news and weather, and doing more and more of your purchasing online, you probably think the Internet has been around forever. But it hasn’t. As you’ll learn from this program on Open University, the Internet turns 40 this year. How did it get started? Where is it taking us next? Find out by listening to these Internet pioneers on iTunes U…
It seems that the recording of my interview is #4 in the top 100 downloads

(I would embed the podcast here – John links to the version of it on the OU podcast site – but the site doesn’t currently support embed codes. As this is a hosted WordPress blog, if it supportd custom OU flashplayer embed codes, that wouldn’t be much good either: WordPress is quite restricted in the embed codes it supports [that is: WordPress blogs hosted on WordPress.com are limited in what you can embed - self-hosted WordPress installations can be configured to let you embed what you like...]. (In a meeting last week, my question as to whether we should offer Youtube embed codes (which are accepted in WordPress) as well as OU podcast player codes was not met with much support… Which means if an OU player embed code had been available, I couldn’t have *easily* used it anyway…(The workaround would be to grab the OU embed code into Vodpod, which is accepted by WordPress…. which gives me an idea – I couldn’t get Vodpod to work with the OU podcast site, but it does work with the nascent UK HE Steeple Podcast Portal:-))

So what I am suggesting, in part, is not that necessarily that we pander to the news cycle (what would that mean, anyway, pander to it?), but that we do make content available that allows news readers to learn more about a topic.

[Hmmm... it seems like this video has disappeared from the Steeple site... ho hum, must be a Steeple thing... will try to see if i can get Vodpod to embed directly from OU podcasts site if i get a chance, assuming the KMi folks don't block it, of course....]

Another example might be come from the rise in interest in news media making raw data available. Surely there is an opportunity here for educational institutions to provide educational material that explains how news readers can engage with this data (and conversely, how educators might make use of such data)? (This is actually something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately…)

Argghhhh – time to go: day 2 of the Isle of Wight Festival beckons… I would have written more but got distracted by the embed sidetrack… ;-)

Time for a New Interaction Metaphor? Click and Wire

I’m guessing that most computer users are all now reasonably familiar with simple mouse control actions (click to select, double click to open, click and drag to resize, drag and drop to move) if not some of the more esoteric ones (right click to open up a context sensitive menu, drag and drop a document icon onto an application icon to open it, or a link from a browser (page or address bar) onto a browser application icon or another browser window to open it elsewhere; you can of course (?!) also drag links onto the favourites toolbar to favourite/bookmark them.

So I’m starting to wonder whether the time is right yet to start talking about another operation: click and wire (or maybe that should be drag and wire?) to describe a subscription action.

There are two steps that I think are required to helping people understand this metaphor. The first is to provide a visual cue showing how things can be clicked and wired together: Yahoo Pipes offers a great example of this idea:

The second thing we need to demonstrate is how website content can be subscribed to in many browsers using a drag and (invisibly) wire approach. To all intents and purposes, this feels like drag and drop. But if you drag the right sort of thing, like a link to an RSS feed, then you are actually clicking and dragging something that is publishing content rather than representing a fixed document.

And if you drop the feed link you’re dragging on to the right sort of thing, like a browser’s feed sidebar, then the drop isn’t the ‘open this application with this document’ action that you get from dropping a document icon onto an application icon, it’s actually a ’subscribe’ action (that is, you have wired the original publishing source/link to something that can display the most recently published items from that source).

Now I can already hear one or two people who read this blog saying “yeah, right, but no-one knows how to spot a feed link, or knows that feedreading sidebars exist”, which may or may not be true. But the RSS feed icon is now pervasive; all we’re missing are the obvious drop targets; and the notion of “click and wire” (where “wire” is to “drop” as “subscribe” is to “open”) or “drag and subscribe”, or some combination thereof…

Guardian DataStore Visualisation Competition

A post over on the Guardian DataStore site last week announced a competition based around visualising data from the Guardian DataStore: Build stuff with our data and win a Flip Mino HD camcorder.

There are two categories for submissions:

1) The best user experience for understanding meaning in data, and
2) The best tool for web developers to build other things with data

I’ve posted quite a few recipes so far that describe different ways of engaging with the data, many of which you can find from posts categorised here with visualisation, so it’d be great to see people trying to run with them.

Many of the recipes I’ve come up with start by getting data out of the spreadsheets as CSV, so that it can then be passed to other services, such as Many Eyes Wikified or Yahoo Pipes; or JSON, so that it can be pulled in to a web page. (My very work in progress Guardian Datastore explorer can be used to generate URIs that run queries on Google spreadsheets, which may be of some use if you want to get started on running SQL like queries on spreadsheet data.)

As far as I know, know one has explored using tools like the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit yet, which could be interesting from the point of view nice UIs, as well as the developer perspective (e.g. a nice set of hooks in to the DataStore from visualisation toolkits or code frameworks). And then of course there are plenty of other more traditional chart toolkits out there…

If you’re after something a little more exotic, how about something like Thematic Mapping, HeatMap API or CloudMade on the geoviz front, though the problem of geocoding DataStore data would have to be solved first (Yahoo Placemaker might be handy there?); the Timetric or the MIT Simile Timeplot or Timeline tools for displaying information against a time axis (none of which have, to date, and as far as I know, been combined with a Fourier Analysis tools to help identify periodicities in the charted data); or how about finding a use for TimeMap, which combines MIT Simile Timeline widgets with Google maps..?

For truly open ended visualisations, using something like Processing may be the way to go: there’s already a Processing wrapper for the OpenPlatform API, but I’m not sure if anyone has provided an easy way (as yet) to pull DataStore content into it. Integration with Processing.js, a Javascript implementation of Processing that makes things like Obsessing possible, is also something that could open up a lot of opportunities for making use of the data?

On the other hand, if it’s analysis you’re after, it might be interesting to see what could be done if the DataStore spreadsheets could be integrated with various stats analysis packages (is there a variant of R as a st of Javascript libraries, I wonder?!)

PS Just for the record, I’m not eligible to enter the competition just at the moment…

An Essential Part of My Workflow

A couple of days ago, on of those reminders about how reliant we are on various pieces of technology was forced upon me: Jing died on me….

For those of you who don’t know it, Jing is a screencapture/screencasting tool that is integrated with flickr (free version, for screenshots) and Youtube (pro version, for screencasts). It’s producd by Techsmith, who also publish the more comprehensive SnagIt and Camtasia tools, so the technical underpinnings of the app are excellent.

Anyway, I’ve been using the free version of Jing for what seems like forever, using it to grab screenshots at will and send them direct to flickr, then typically pasting the embed code that is magically popped into my clipboard directly into my WordPress editor. But I’ve decided that I really need to do more screencasts, and whilst Jing automates video uploads to screencast.com, I really wanted the ability to post screencasts direct to Youtube. So on Sunday I upgraded, and after a couple of battles getting the upgrade to take, uploaded a couple of test screencasts to Youtube, easy as anything.

And then, on Tuesday, late on Tuesday, at a time when Tuesday had bcome Wednesday and I really wanted to call an end to the day, save for finishijng off a post with a couple of screenshots, Jing died. Every time I restarted it, it claimed I was no longer a Pro user, and died.

So I reinstalled, and tried again. Same thing. Reboot my Mac, and try again. Still no joy, Crate a new, free account, and whenever I started Jing, it crashed.

Superstition kicked in and I blamed the upgrade, trying (maybe successfully, maybe not) to send a help request to Techsmith. (Finding the help was a nightmare, I think I had to create a new account on a help system somewhere along the way, and on posting a help email, I couldn’t tell whether it had been submitted or not.) The typical online help rigmarole, essentially. Even if you don’t start off angry, you’re likely to end up furious. (Plus I was really flagging by now and maybe not thinking as clearly as I might!)

A search on Twitter turned up a @techsmith account, and the contact details of someone at Camtasia, who I emailed. But it was passed days’ end, even in the US, so I went looking for an alternative. (I could of course have just used the Mac screengrab tools to do what I needed, and then uploaded the images to flickr using flock, but I was looking to punish to Camtasia by finding an alternative to Jing that worked just as well!)

In the end, I settled on Skitch, and it sort of worked okay, but it was nothing like as painless as Jing. For every screenshot I took, I just wanted Jing back…

…anyway, I picked up a friendly email from Techsmith yesterday saying there had been problems, and a tweeted prompt from Techsmith last night asking if Jing was now working for me again (it was/is). The problem, it seems, was at the Techsmith end, an issue that caused Jing on Mac Tiger to crash (I’m intrigued as to how a problem on the webservice end and kill an app running on the desktop? This is a harbinger of things to come more generally with web apps, maybe?)

So what do I take from this experience? Firstly, Jing is part of what I do, and it does just what it needs to for me. Secondly, without twitter I’d have had a really crap customer experience trying to understand what was going on (had something gone bad with my Pro upgrade? Was it a Jing problem or my problem? and so on..).

As it’s turned out, rather than writing a ranty post saying I’ve now changed my screencapture tool because of blah, blah, blah, if anyone asks what tool I use for screencaptures, I’d still say Jing. And from the ease of use in uploading screencaptured videos to Youtube, I’d also recommend the upgrade to Jing Pro if quick’n'easy raw screencasts are your thing.

Guerrilla Education: Teaching and Learning at the Speed of News

Wikinomics author Don Tapscott has been at it again, (giving @liamgh yet another Mexican Wave opportunity), complementing a recent essay in which he argues “that the universities are entering a period of crisis” with a linkbait post asking Will universities stay relevant?

[UPDATE: this post is way to much of a ramble; the point is in the last para, republished here because I know you're just skimming this post and will probably miss it: How about engaging in a bit of guerrilla teaching and looking for opportunities to help people understand something better, or learn how to do something they are currently struggling with. If we help people learn at the point of need, maybe they’ll be inspired enough to engage in more formal learning opportunities? And even if they don’t, maybe we’ll have helped make the world a slightly better informed place? ]

I posted a comment there – for what it’s worth – and by linking back to the post from here as well, I’ll maybe raise my profile on that thread via a trackback (and perhaps even get a tiny bit of traffic from that site flowing this way too;-)

Shameless traffic mongering? You got it!

Anyway, anyway, as I’m here, here’s a quick thought about guerrilla education, and engaging with the news cycle.

Somewhen over the last couple of weeks, I stopped in my tracks whilst reading the opening section of The culture of copying on the BBC News dot life blog:

Oh no: another boring report about piracy by a strange body with an obscure title.

That was my first reaction on getting hold of Copycats? Digital Consumers in the Online Age – a report for the Strategic Advisory Board on Intellectual Property.

But when I read on, the report was full of fascinating insights into the way that we’ve all begun to think about the rights and wrongs of online piracy – or rather, “unauthorised downloading”, which is how this report for the government carefully describes it.

The authors, from University College London, point to evidence that what they amusingly call the “UK’s unauthorised downloading community” now stands at nearly seven million people, and they question the assumption that these are just teenagers and students – it seems older people are downloading too.

What shocked me? Well, here’s a report, maybe interesting, maybe not, in an area that borders on things I’m interested in, that maybe has something to contribute to a course I have a loose affiliation with (Beyond Google: working with information online), written by academics (but does that matter, except maybe I can trust it without further verification…?!) and just released (i.e. the data shouldn’t be more than a couple of years old!;-)

Now the situation as it currently stands is that the media find these reports and then report on them, interpreting the report contents for a larger audience as they do so. Sometimes they even go to academics for further comment (for example, we had a request round for comment on a Sunday Times piece that was being put together yesterday (I wasn’t in a position to field it at the time) and my colleague Ray Corrigan provided a comment for a piece in today’s Technology Guardian (online at Sweden’s Pirate party sails to success in European elections). A sleeper podcast from John Naughton has also picked up significant amounts of traffic lately from the 40th anniversary of the internet (The Internet at 40).

I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that there’s a group in the OU who are currently looking at the way we engage with ‘the wider web’ through the current hotch-potch of web properties such as open2.net, OpenLearn and Platform. For those of you who aren’t familiar with these sites:

- open2.net is the site that is used to support OU BBC programmes (the Reith Lectures are a current major feature);
- OpenLearn is th home of the OU’s open educational content initiative; and
- Platform is the OU’s social soft edges, a community site (open to all, not just OU students, current and past).

(There’s also the OU Research website, which has still (IMHO) yet to find its feet. And the Faculty websites – the Science Faculty website is probably the most engaging at the moment. There are departmental websites too (e.g. my department’s website: Communication and Systems, which is in yet another holding pattern as we wait for yet another relaunch!;-); and there’s the OU Podcast site too, of course (I won’t mention the various Youtube channel pages, iTunesU, Steeple, etc etc;-).)

Of all those sites, news related items feature on a surprising number of them, and yet the disconnect between our formal teaching, and exploiting news related, ad hoc teaching opportunities is significant (although it has to be said that the folks working on /Platfrom do seem to have been keeping an eye and the sorts of thing that are likely to pull in traffic at any given time:-)

Anyway, one of the things I’ve been mulling over for a some time has been the extent to which journalists, academics and students are all engaged in trying to make sense of the world. Timescale is one of the differences, I think? Another is that academics tend to strive for a model of how things work in general (e.g. how populations behave in general), whereas journalists often seem to take a generalised issue and humanise it by illuminating a general case with a particular case (the story of a particular person with a particular condition or in a particular exemplar situation, for example).

So here’s my starter for 10 (which is a shame, because this post is already long enough…): should we as academics be engaging with the news cycle in order to deliver informal, opportunistic “teaching” at the point of need (i.e. at those points where people might be confused about a topic, realising they don’t understand it as well as they might, or where they may be minded to learn more.)

One of the now well worn ways of thinking about this (in the OU and BBC at least) that comes in and out of fashion (current status: IN) is the idea of a learning journey, that takes a generally interested viewer down a path of discovery from an informal encounter with a topic, through some “further information” about the topic, and possibly a free open education course, until they eventually sign up for a formally delivered course.

Traditionally, the OU has had several starting points for learning journeys: BBC driven traffic to open2.net, local recruitment onto Openings courses from various regional Widening Participation initiatives, as well as planned (or opportunistic) “marketing” initiatives such as the Outsmart the Recession site. More recently, Platform looks (to me at least) like it’s also trying to deliver contextual/content lead marketing in a community based environment.

(Just by the by, I really think we should be running our own ad-platform across OU sites that serves up personalised course ads and related educational content, cf. Arise Ye Databases of Intention.)

But where else might we provide an entry point to a learning journey. How about out there? How about keeping tabs on what’s going on in the wider world, and us engaging with it, creating opportunities (e..g. by commenting on third party posts) for people to follow a path back to OU sites; and failing that, maybe they’ll learn something useful from us anyway (we are paid for using public funds, after all). How about engaging in a bit of guerrilla teaching and looking for opportunities to help people understand something better, or learn how to do something they are currently struggling with. If we help people learn at the point of need, maybe they’ll be inspired enough to engage in more formal learning opportunities? And even if they don’t, maybe we’ll have helped make the world a slightly better informed place?

Or not…

PS if there’s an argument in there somewhere that I’m fumbling towards, it maybe contains some or all of the following pieces:
- good advertising (relevant, timely, appropriate) is content;
- people need help to understand the news (readers as well as journalists);
- educational material is content;
- educational material sampled from a course may act as a tease, advert or lead-in for that course;
- if someone learns something from content that’s a Good Thing;
- people don’t just learn when they’re studying a formal course;
- there’s news everyday (i.e. lots of opportunities to wrap new content with other content);
- news is often syndicated;
- news can provide context for learning;
- any given learning topic may provide a context for republishing news stories;
- etc…

Enough…