I was half expecting to be writing a blog post saying "I'm moving my blogs, please update your RSS feeds" but instead I'm here writing about the blogging software instead.
b2e has a very nice feature - it supports multiple different blogs on the same installation. Past that it's... well it's blogging software. You get to make posts, add comments, there are tools for multiple users, multiple blogs, widgets to let you have trackback, auto-twittering new posts and more.
There are a couple of places where it's a bit cantankerous but I got it up and working actually quite quickly. So why isn't this an "I'm moving" post? Well because the effort to transport posts over proved very high. Add to that the pain of telling you to redirect RSS feeds... and it's just not worth it. If, however, I was setting up blogs for a school say or a class, I'd go for it I think. It was all pretty easy to do from the look of it and a blog per child that you can get into all of, that they can only post to their own - sounds good to me!
Two new project management tools based in the cloud crossed my desk today. First up is Clutterpad. I'm not sure that Clutterpad is significantly different to Basecamp to be honest although their pricing plan is clearly aimed at acquiring new customers from Basecamp - they have quite a variety of smaller plans and their top of the range plan is set $10/month cheaper.
Both Basecamp and Clutterpad are fully featured project management tools. You can set up contacts databases, to do lists, set up chat rooms, message each other and so on. They are aimed at, frankly, doing everything and whilst I'm sure they're very useful they run the risk, for me at least, of duplicating effort and records. I don't want to be opening a new project, setting up new contacts etc. for each query I get - some of which don't turn into projects after all. I want to discuss terms in email, move on to meetings in SL if appropriate, and use all my existing workflows for many of the jobs that these two offer. I'm not keen enough on the tools to switch part way from current tools to either of these, even when I could.
It's worth noting, too, that if you're a professional in this field, many of the things like Gantt charts that you will probably regard as essential just aren't there.
Enter Scrumy. It's tempting to dismiss scrumy as having far fewer features than Basecamp and Clutterpad - and that's true. It may well have too few features for you. But, if like me you're essentially a lone consultant working on a mix of projects with existing work flows that cope with most things, this might be just what you need. You can easily set up a new project, set up the different large tasks, and then add to do items to each of these tasks. There's a colour-coded system to identify whose tasks they are (although I work alone here, I often work with teams for clients and being able to colour-code their to dos sounds good to me), and although the interface is rather different to other project management tools, you can easily drag things around to set priority orders, and drag them across from "to do" to "in progress" to "done" to "approved" with nice clear visual feedback.
I'm in the middle of a project, one that is about to be protected by an NDA so I can't give you a link or discuss it further I'm afraid, but setting up the tasks and the to do lists for it felt natural and easy. I'm sure I'm tired enough that I've missed some things out, but the ability to easily rearrange them makes me feel confident I can just add bits as needed and reshuffle if I must. For $7/month, or $60/year you can password protect a project and only share it with the people you mean to as well - although random URLs will make them hard to stumble upon if you don't need that protection.
I don't know that scrumy will prove to be my project management tool of choice but it's in a better place than the others, for me at least. It adds extra tools to my current ones and is light and easy to use, rather than either leaving me ignoring 90% of the tool suite or (really) trying to force me to use it their way.
I recently saw an advert for the new version of Opera, proclaiming it the fastest browser in the world.
Whilst speed isn't everything, I quite often have my browser start up and then tap fingers whilst tap reload, so a good browser that is faster at this could be of interest. I have, in a separate issue, been invited to a beta version of a browser based game that requires either IE or Firefox (neither of which are my core browser) for the game's tool bar.
This has made me start to think about browsers and also experiment a bit with swapping browsers around, and ultimately decide NOT to do this.
The fun and games start with exporting and transferring bookmarks around. All the browsers I can find have an "export" function, but not all browsers are good at importing them. In particular, in Opera all the sorting data is destroyed and whilst there are ways to get your order back (you can create nicknames for sorting) it is a major PITA. OPera is not helped by the fact that dragging bookmarks around into the "Bookmarks Bar" folder doesn't seem to actually put them there! By contrast, importing into Safari takes seconds and does retain the sorting order, dragging into the bookmarks bar area puts them there instantly and so on. Importing into Firefox from Safari is really easy too - that's the only one I tried though.
And then there's all the fun of the little differences. How big are the relevant buttons, folders, etc? Do the tabs hang down, pop-up, fill the space? How does the password system work with the existing password storage? Some of these are, obviously, completely aesthetic choices, the latter will depend on what password storage system you use. But it can, and for me does, make a difference. The layout of Opera, in my purely subjective opinion, was awkward to use. I never felt at home trying to use it and quite rapidly gave up. Both Opera and Firefox use their own password storage system. Whilst I don't have a problem with that per se, I can't seem to retrieve stored passwords from Firefox, and in both of them things like entering my server backend required re-entering passwords from the keychain, lots and lots of times! Their definition of the site I was entering seemed much tighter than keychain's so clicking on various stored links each required re-entering the password. Argh. And, if I changed it on one place, it wouldn't automatically update into Coda. Bad browser!
Both Firefox and Opera might test as faster browsers, Opera blindingly so in my case, but... in practise, looking at the pages I actually look at, I couldn't see the difference in general and for some of the sites I use they were noticeably slower than my browser of choice (Opera in particularly tended to only partly render pages and require the reload button to be pressed to fully load it on some of the sites that I use). That was, for me, the final nail in Opera's coffin - but of course your mileage may vary just as the sites you visit regularly will vary from mine.
Where have I ended up? Well I currently have no fewer than 3 browsers in my dock. Camino, still my browser of choice; Safari and Firefox. Safari using the web inspector is nice for checking how websites are generated and what changes javascript causes to the DOM. Firefox with Firebug might be better (a lot of people tell me it is) but Safari does it as native and does it perfectly well for what I want and need. Firefox is purely there for the game I'm playing (which I'll be reviewing soon). I might switch from Camino to Safari over time, although the Camino habit is still strong.
Just how much of a pain changing could be was a shock. I've recently largely turned away from Word and Open Office to using Bean, a free, lightweight word-processor package. Just about all of the keyboard short-cuts are different yet it has proven easier to make that switch than to change browsers where so much is so similar. And, whilst you might be addicted to your 10 million Firefox plug-ins I'm still very happily avoiding them and the architecture that gives them to you. Slimmer browsing, less options for bells and whistles, and no conflicts, no plug-ins helpfully doing things you don't want and so on. Bliss.
Much though I love, and use, Google and in particular gMail their pesky spam filters are often over-eager. People, let's call them potential or actual clients because that's usually the case, send me attachments describing what they're after. This is generally speaking something I want. An unacceptably high period of the time Google's over-eager spam filters decide it's not something I want.
The solution? Well after (ironically but inevitably I guess) hitting up Google for their "core function" of searching the internet I found a way out. You can set up a filter (in this case it's equivalent to a rule in most non-cloud email systems) that says, in effect, if you spot something you think is spam, DON'T move it to the spam folder. Mine checks for Matches: is: spam and Do this: Never send it to Spam. You have to tell it that yes, you really mean this (it doesn't like trying to match is: spam but will if you tell it you really mean it).
What's the impact? Well, the amount of spam I'm getting has gone up - although it's not bad. It's taken about two weeks for my spam filters in mail (that's the mac email client) to learn how to spot all the new spam but I only had about 1 or 2 of false negatives per day after day 1 (I had about 10 the first day) and I've had zero false positives in that time. It takes me about the same number of milliseconds to scan over the titles, hit cmd-A and delete to get rid of them as it did before. Interesting side effect? I've registered for a couple of new online services, or changed email addresses for one, in that time. They were usually terrible for being filtered by gMail. They've ALL come through successfully.
If gMail's hyperactive spam filters annoy you, it's well worth it.
You may or may not recognise the picture to the right. It's one of the latest Facebook crazes, Restaurant City, in which you run a restaurant and try to balance customer service, profit, keeping your workforce happy, designing the interior of the restaurant and somewhere in there, there's meant to be some fun too.
It adds some elements of social networking and level-based game play that, quite clearly, make sure it's not a real simulation of the restaurant trade but it still reflects some good and some bad points of simulations. I'm going to use it as my example really because it's NOT a serious simulation and so the things I'm going to raise are really critical of it, but might help you think about your more serious simulation.
The game uses some sort of agent-based model. A potential customer walks in to your restaurant and looks around to check the floor is clean. If it isn't they walk out in disgust. Then they look for somewhere to sit. If there is somewhere they head over there, otherwise they pause in the door for a little while and if not seat comes available they turn around and walk out. If there is somewhere to sit they make their way over, then check if there's a table and if there is, if it's cleared. If there's no table, or it's not cleared they complain and wait a while. If a table seat becomes available they head over there, and check if it's cleared. If the table isn't cleared they complain and leave. Once all of that is done they choose items from your menu, place the order and wait to be served. If they wait too long they complain and leave, otherwise they eat or drink their item and leave, possibly giving you a thumbs-up which translates to both improved customer rating (the 50.0 in the top right, maximum rating) and to "experience points" towards the next level, and always paying you, which lets you buy more ingredients to improve your menu, or to decorating your restaurant, or to blinging out your avatar or your wage-slaves. That is your friends, not wage-slaves, honest. Some proportion of those who leave give you a thumbs down, which decreases your customer rating.
The chefs take a set time to prepare a meal, which depends on how happy you keep them. A glass of water every 36 minutes keeps them totally happy - not even wage slaves! The waiters take time to walk around, to serve food and drinks, to clean the table and the like. The cleaner does something similar but roams more widely.
The customers, particularly those complaining about something, tell you clearly what they're not happy about with little icons over their heads.
So far this all sounds quite reasonable. If you were going to design a sim for a restaurant you might include all of these features. You might want to tweak the "waiting for a table" code a bit after a little while watching it, but fundamentally all the elements work and are there.
So why does my very popular and fairly successful restaurant look like almost NO restaurant I've ever seen? There's a long (and it will be longer probably) barrier in there by the door. Why? It slows the customers down, means the waiter has a bit more time to try and clear the table for them. Without that it's fast food to the extreme as customers charge to the nearest seat as soon as it's vacant and there's no way for the waiter to get the tables by the door cleared.
Additionally, all customers are single parties (single covers I believe the restaurant trade calls them), but they're all quite happy to snuggle up close to strangers in the seating arrangements. I'm not sure what the breakdown of sizes of parties is in a restaurant and I suspect it changes by culture, trade, position etc. too but restaurants aren't laid out like that in most places, because if you're alone you usually want to eat alone, if you're a couple you often want to stare across the table into each other's eyes and not sit side-by-side with strangers on either side of you.
This layout is great for cellular automata that just look for a seat and don't stop to think about who is sat next to them but real people aren't usually like that. It's also great for the waiting staff - they have very little distance to move to serve everyone, although the HSE might say something about the diagonals where they lean over the stoves and the customers might say something about the diagonals where they loom over one or two adjacent customers.
The menuing system is designed to try and make this a social game - it bears no resemblance to RL systems. My top rated restaurant serves one starter, one main, one dessert, one drink. Even the local hot-dog stand has more variety, although the local market stand that sells doughnuts doesn't, it sells only 1 item. OK, that's a choice made to make the game social and depart from simulating the real trade but I bet IRL you wouldn't get such a good rating from such a minimal menu!
Although Restaurant City really isn't intended as a serious simulation of a restaurant, it is interesting to note that it contains quite a lot of the rules that would make it work as such a tool. However, those critical missing rules, or rules deliberately suppressed to enhance game play, suddenly change it to giving a really quite unrealistic simulation. It's a point to remember - you've got to make your simulation complicated enough to make it work close enough to reality in order to be able to test things. And it's also worth remembering if you do change something, stress a condition, you need to consider if the results you get would translate to a real situation or if you're exposing a fracture line in the model. Most of the time they're valid and valuable, but you do need to remember they might not be!
I find myself asking, increasingly irately, as someone of an age to have "had my brains fried by too much TV" and now, apparently, of an age to meet my partner via social media (how apt for those of you that know enough about my personal life to grin here) just how surprising this is.
As a teenager, and indeed as an adult, I found it tricky to form social connections. I would normally say 'I'm shy' rather 'I find it tricky to form social connections' but the former is a subset of the latter I think. I'm not 'OMG, Eloise is a sociopath' tricky, but I would have been one of whatever percentage it was in my day and age that "feel left out and don't fit clearly into any social group" or shy and "a bad joiner" if you prefer. But please remember we're talking about teenagers here - teenagers are notoriously prone to feeling "left out" and "not fitting in." If we go back 20 years, 40 years and 60 years would we find anything different? Well yes, we'd find something else to blame - television, free love and drugs, new-fangled talkies, whatever it was, but we'd find a pattern of older people in uproar that the 'Youf of today' are a disgrace, anti-social, degenerate, society is doomed and so on.
Society, of course, as they saw it, and probably as we see it, is doomed. The world of 2009 is very different to the world of 1989, 1969 and 1949. In 1949 car ownership was rare, by 1989 it was very common. In 1949 TV was essentially unknown, by 1969 it was common and just changing to colour from black and white, by 2009 there's a good chance you watch TV and listen to the radio on your computer rather than on a TV or radio. In 1949 Apartheid, called segregation, was in full force in the USA. By 1989 it was, at least officially, dismantled. By 2009 racism is still an issue but things are I think; from my comfortable, white, outsider's persepective; better for many - although black ghettos and doubtless other things are still a very significant problem. Would you care to predict what changes will be here by 2029 or 2049? I wouldn't.
Some change is almost certainly, overall, bad. The change from a society in which manual labour predominated to one in which sedentary labour predominates without a concurrent change to healthier and less calorific dietary habits is doubtless contributing to obesity. Dieticians also argue that the nature of what we eat is contributing to this, another societal change. Of course there are other causes, and there are those who choose to change their diets and remain thin, but overall obesity is rising and that's because part of society changed and other parts haven't yet adapted.
On the other hand, unless you're a bigot, the dismantling of Apartheid, Segregation, the changes to laws to promote equal rights for women, disabled people and the like, and the changes they're causing in society are pretty overwhelmingly good.
Facebook, Twitter, Second Life and so on are changes. There is nothing wrong with saying "we should be careful, not all changes are good" but we should also be aware that changes are both inevitable and not all bad either. Further, we should probably be very cautious about guessing which are which.
In 1929 antibiotics were essentially unknown. Fleming had isolated Penicillin the previous year but as a drug of choice it wasn't available. By 1969 antibiotics were in common use for just about everything. By 2009 we're clinging on by our fingertips to treating most bacterial infections - by MRSA is a massive scare still because all it needs to add is Vancomycin resistance and we've got a bacterial infection that we can't treat with drugs. Were those changes over the last 80 years good or bad? The answer is yes, really, if we're honest. People, smart people, made best guesses based on the information they had. Hindsight lets us say "God, I wish they'd chosen some other option" but they weren't evil or stupid, they just hadn't thought of these things then.
Are Facebook and Twitter destined to destroy society? Probably. Will they change it into something better or something worse? Pass. I'm just about smart and wise enough to say "I can't answer that."
Coda is a piece of Mac software for coding on a server.
It combines an FTP client with a context-sensitive text-editor with auto-complete and some other nifty bits: a visual CSS editor, and a built-in preview function for example, and plugs-in.
What does that mean in English? Well instead of opening Transmit (or Cyberduck or similar) and using that to organise your files and folders across your machine and the server, but editing in Smultron or similar (Text Mate, Text Edit, Preview etc.) you fire up Coda, connect to the site, and start editing away. You can always the file structure in the site you're working on because it's there in the sidebar. How useful is this? Well, it varies, but if you're crossing linking to other pages in your site, it's awesome because it's easy to check the file names directly. It's useful enough that even on days I don't need it, it's a plus. The iMac has plenty of screen estate to use, but the MacBook likes the smaller footprint this gives, and I like not switching between applications unnecessarily.
It also remembers what you were working on, so if you have been working on a micro-site and open up the main site it diverts you to the micro-site AND reopens all the files you were working on. THAT I find wonderful, knowing I can go for lunch or similar and come back, reconnect and pick things up from where I left it. Lovely touch. Finish that site? Close the files, navigate back to the root, and next time you open that site, you're back there.
Not necessarily to everyone's taste, but it uses tabs for your open files so you can easily (well for a smallish site) have all the files open and flick between them. Smultron lets you do this from the side-bar, but I've got used to tabs, and like tabs here too.
Again not to everyone's taste, but there is a visual as well as a text-based CSS editor. I find I write the CSS in the text-based editor, and usually edit it that way too, but the visual editor lets you see all the classes you've created with their colour coding, so if there's an element that's misbehaving the visual editor gives me a wonderfully quick system to check why that might be.
I'm not normally a fan of auto-completing editors, but this one I like. You start typing the code and it narrows down to find the right thing, using a smart selector, (so if you're in html and writing as an instruction mysql_query() it won't pop up the completion) and in html once you complete an open tag (e.g.
Ok, after my post yesterday I did some playing. In part I've been using Coda and exploring what that can do for me. I'm starting to think that I'll be splashing out to buy it, something that's an integrated FTP client, editor and preview tool, with CSS built in AND nice autocomplete functions for the main, it's not quite the same as working in Smultron and Transmit, but so far there's only one niggle and I can work with that - after I check the preferences to make sure it's not already there.
But, the other thing was to start replying to my MBS task from yesterday. I've found a pure CSS solution to my desire to make an accessible site. You can see the proposed new look at http://educationaldesigns.eloisepasteur.net/newindex.php which qualifies under Section 508 for US visitors, and the W3C WAI-AA guidelines. It fails a privacy policy check, but that's OK, because it doesn't have any private information on it, it's advertising what I do. Although the links work, this is currently the only page that has the new stylesheet and code. If you have any comments, in particular if you ignore the warning about Internet Explorer and see if it displays properly there (IE 5.0 for Mac works OK so I think it will work on windows machines) or if you have opinions about the new layout, look etc. please let me know (either directly or in comments).
As for today's MBS actitivies: long taiji practise today covers, in some ways, all of them. My mind will additionally be challenged with tidying up the rather messy CSS I've currently got from bolting my old (rather neat) CSS and the new (rather messier) navigation-bar CSS together, and mind and spirit in rereading at least some of Chen Man Ching's "My Words Are Very Easy To Understand" a commentary on the Dao De Jing. Chen Man Ching is the founder of the school of taiji I mainly practise, but also a scholar of Daoist philosophy in the Confucian-humanist school. I'm rather anti both Confucianism and humanist interpretations of a remarkably unhumanist philosophy, and whilst sometimes such disagreements tend to raise the blood pressure and the ire, this is well written and provokes thought and reflection which is not a bad thing.
Solvr is a fairly interesting tool that lets you structure problem solving, and share it around. It's not ultimately secure (it's a random URL, but that's it), and the site warns that it's in alpha development and prone to crashing, but I didn't have any problems when using it for a couple of projects.
I'm not convinced it will be a tool for my personal use - I problem solve reasonably efficiently as it is - but I can see using it with a student for outlining a coding project and breaking it down into chunks, outlining the problems as they occur to her, and offering solutions, or highlighting existing problems and letting her tackle them and suggest approaches to solve them. The ability to collapse and expand groups of problems strikes me as fairly essential - I'm more used to spidergrams for this kind of thing and sprawling in all directions (omnigraffle lets you do this on the computer too, but not co-operatively) and the colour coding changing to green as soon as an idea is presented to solve a particular problem seems to give very strong positive feedback to the process.
There are tools, such as voting, that I haven't used, but that I can see being useful in thrashing out a large project, particularly a large international project where you can let people dive in and play with the problems and ideas very much asynchronously. Not sure it will get my long term use, but I will explore its use with learners and go from there. And thanks to Peter for originally blogging about it and making me curious enough to go and look.
So long to death by powerpoint? Maybe. Prezi is a new tool that aims to do what powerpoint does, but differently. There is a free option available to give it a go, as long as you can cope with their logo being on your presentation. If you decide to use it regularly, it's pretty cheap, and their logo goes too.
There are some nice things about Prezi:
It lets you be structured when you choose, and also to break out of structures and templates when you want or need to
It will appeal to gestalist teachers because it's great for giving an overview!
You can use font style (in some limited ways) but scale and angle to help reinforce your message
It's remarkably easy to use from scratch (although there are some things that still elude me after a few minutes playing). I made a presentation, mostly to try it out, in about 10 minutes. I could probably have done it slightly faster in powerpoint, but only slightly and that's with a lot more familiarity
Although positioning etc. is a bit of work at first, using the controller soon becomes very quick (unlike powerpoint which remains relatively painful to my mind), and in particular setting and altering the path (which is analogous to the slide order in ppt) is very quick and intuitive, much nicer than ppt.
Of course I'm not going to tell you it's a perfect solution: I don't believe there is such a thing out there after all, unless you write it yourself and then it's only perfect for you. I would like more control over fonts, colours and styles - in particular if I was working with a class where I had to juggle various accessibility options. I couldn't work out how to group things, nor how to delete things I'd added but didn't like, but they're minor niggles. But, I think the ability to develop structured elements and then break out into more unstructured elements, along with that overview to show people what's going on and a consistent pattern of transitions to limit that particular insanity works very nicely for a lot of situations.
Ugh. That's my honest impression after nearly two hours and running through the tutorials.
Over to the right is Eloise in Metaplace. Avatar customisation is risible in terms of the options, but much easier than Second Life. You can choose male or female, you can choose one of about a dozen hair-styles, a dozen tops, a dozen bottoms (skirts/trousers and shoes all in one), and you can play with the colours a bit - from a limited palette which, incidentally, will stop you being a real blonde or a real red-head if you wish to be, but green hair and blue skin is quite easy. Not necessarily the right shade of either though!
Unlike Second Life you get your own plot of land, and you can easily resize it, within limits. However, unlike Second Life, it's not connected to anything. Some might see that as good of course, it means you can't accidentally see the neighbour's strip club, but I find it quite odd having an island afloat without context. It's not only Second Life where you get context after all - if you're used to running around in WoW or similar, you have a basically continuous world, even if you "cheat" across continents.
The tutorials in Metaplace are reasonably short, usually fairly well constructed, although like Second Life, they're sometimes already out of date. When the tutorial tells you to click button X and it doesn't exist, that's more than a little confusing at first, even to me: Am I choosing the right option?
It's reasonably easy to build - you can see next to me the inevitable puppy that one tutorial takes you through rezzing, and a tinted street light I built to test that out. You can also see the pool of light next to it - but although I managed to colour the light, I couldn't make the pool of light bigger despite options that seemed should do this. Mind you, as you can see from the next picture, trying to make an object link to a website other than metaplace proved to not work. I set my homepage up as the target and when I click on the object, it's forgotten the behaviour I set and tries to open metaplace... The process is actually not really any easier than editing a well-crafted llLoadURL script, and at least the load URL script works reliably!
Whilst thinking of building, it proved remarkably easy to build a big wall. You select your wall object, drag out an area on the map, and hey presto a nice wall. Of course if your land isn't even, you get an uneven wall too, which isn't quite what I expected, but it's an acceptable quirk. What proved far less acceptable was the fact that I can only delete the wall one panel at a time. ARGH! Your tutorial tells me to make two lumps of wall, and to select an area to build that big wall. It doesn't tell me I have to delete the sections one-by-one, which took far, far longer than I'd like. I found that incredibly frustrating. I wonder too, about the long term impact on creativity: one of the features that makes Second Life work well, once you're used to it, is the ease of deleting things that have gone wrong and starting again. My feeling is that this enhances creativity once you're used to it, because it makes you willing to take risks knowing that you can easily throw out the things that don't work.
Having given a demo on building only two days ago, I mentioned just how much I use the camera controls and change the point of view, often by small angles and distances. I should have asked someone to count how many times I moved the camera for the handbag I built for the demo. I would guess, though, that in the 15 minutes or so I spent doing it I moved the camera about 200 times, maybe more. Having that fully 3D world lets you, as well as perhaps forcing you, to adopt that building process. Having a 2.5D world and the limited camera angles and positions really destroys that process. I found the 2.5D presentation somewhat awkward and game like when compared to Second Life, but when building I'm so used to having my camera point of view entirely divorced from my avatar point of view that when I couldn't move it, particularly when the tool options (kind of the equivalent or a right-click in SL) fell off the bottom of the page because I was too far away.
And my final thought on building - I'm not 100% sure yet, but it looks like "building" in metaplace is a remarkably not-in-metaplace activity. I think, from what I've seen, rather than taking prims and building, and being able to work on things that way, custom building will be making a top (probably no bottom) and 4 elevations as textures (whether in 3DSMax, Photoshop or whatever) and then importing those textures into metaplace and painting your "box" with those textures. Of course people build that way in Second Life sometimes, but it's not the ONLY way to do it which it appears to be here.
Of course some of this might be the problem of trying to change skills from my almost 5 years in Second Life now, and struggling with the habits I've picked up when I have to learn new habits. However, equally seriously if you are going to want people to migrate to your platform, you're going to want to beat the competition aren't you? Building in metaplace doesn't beat building in Second Life, in fact it lags horribly behind it at the moment.
Will I be going back? Maybe. I could, for example, do with looking at Lua in application a bit and seeing what I think of that. I could do with finding out what the loading of a world is like - if you think Second Life is empty, I spent almost all of my first two hours entirely alone, even when I went to Metaplace Central there was one other avatar there when I arrived who left promptly after, and when I went to the apparently popular zooescape game I was all alone too. Whilst it's intriguing and I think better than Small Worlds was at this point, I'm unconvinced it's going to challenge in the longer term.
And, finally not a metaplace specific rant, but a general one. Cloud computing is making us think, for the first time, that we don't need different applications - Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc. - on our computer, but we can do it directly in our browser. If you move around a lot you might do that all the time, but I rather suspect most of us still reach for Word (or in my case NeoOffice) when using our "main" computer because the direct application does more, faster, and without the connection problems you get with Google Docs etc. occasionally. If you play WoW, EVE etc. buying the client software (and downloading huge upgrades from time to time) works because it gives you a better quality than running in flash in a browser. Why shouldn't I run my MUVE in a specific client? Yes, it might be a pain for universities to upgrade regularly (actually, hacking the client and adding your own channel to it can stop you having to do that in a very easy step, but never mind), but many educational institutions also run educational fire-walls. I bet the college where I do a few hours a week blocks Metaplace on the basis that it's "a game site."
Or How I Stopped Twittering And Learned To Love The Blog
In the comments to a post a few days ago someone asked me if I was still using my Twitter account. I said no, and that I might explain why sometime soon. So here I am.
It's ironic really, in a year in which twitter has been all over the news and the media in a wider sense in the UK - sparked in part I think by Stephen Fry talking about twittering on a popular chat show - and here I am explaining why I stopped using them several months ago, and why I'm unlikely to go back.
Please bear in mind these are incredibly idiosyncratic and personal reasons - in fact the very reasons I put forward might be reasons why you decide to use one or the other or both. My real problems are threefold:
The content
The drain on my time and attention
The character limits
There is, as always, a range of content in twitter/plurk. You get the (alleged) Facebook style updates - I'm going to bed, I'm going to the pub, the train is late this morning etc. Nothing at all wrong with that, and sometimes that's useful information even, but most of the time I just don't really care. Someone on my twitter list used to update his twitter with, amongst other things, US College Football results. I really didn't give a damn about that, but obviously he did! I still read his blog though. You get people pointing out interesting new things too - from blog posts to news reports to Dr. Evil episodes - and that sense of connection I do miss, in part. Except half of the content I get told about this way comes through a few minutes later on the RSS reader... And then you get the genuinely interesting comments, ideas and the like that come from somewhere unpredictable - and these I really miss except finding the signal amongst the noise is such hard work!
And that brings me neatly to the drain on my time and attention. I could have a twitter/plurk account with next to no friends and it would be no drain on my attention. But I'd have little or no signal too. No point. So, I follow various SL, educational, blogging etc. luminaries. Nothing wrong there of course. Except that makes the total load creep up, and the noise increases because these people don't just send out signal, none of them (including me). Plurk was, for me, generally nicer because I had to go to their site (or open my SSB that pointed at it) and then I could quickly catch up on new posts. I also liked the timeline approach they used to show the new content but with threading built in rather more than I liked the twitter interface by the way. But, that's still a conscious decision to go and spend the time, and I could easily spend 1-2 hours a day catching up on reading the new plurks. Twitter had the great potential to be worse. Whilst I could use it that way, twitter is really designed as a push medium - it will push new updates to your phone, your IM client etc. Whilst this is good in some ways - you don't have to set aside chunks of 10 minutes (or more) to catch up with what you've missed, it's also a nuisance because it's interrupting you continuously as people twitter about the snow, the sun, the fact they won't be twittering for an hour because they're going to a lecture or whatever. THAT I found even more annoying in the long run.
Ah, the long run. A nice link into this last bit. I don't like short stories in general as a medium. Whilst any author out there might disagree with me, there's no short story I've read that couldn't be improved by being a novel. If the idea and setting is good enough to be a story, it's good enough to be a book dammit. If it's not good enough to be a book, then it's not good enough to write! It's kind of ironic because I used to contribute regularly to a drabble fanfic site with a 100-400 word limit, and I enjoyed reading the other contributions too. I enjoyed it even more when the drabble restrictions were lifted and short stories and longer, novella length pieces were published chapter by chapter though. But a 140 character limit rather encourages brevity to the point of inanity I think. I routinely write single sentences that are appreciably longer than the 140 character limit. On a bad day I write sentences that are longer than 140 words! Expressing complex thoughts in a reasonable and well rounded form takes time, space, and more than 140 characters.
Blogs score nicely here. They're not as immediate as a twitter/plurk of course, because it takes time (35 minutes so far and counting on this piece for example) to put a decent blog post together, but at the same time they're more immediate than writing a formal paper or similar. They have, perhaps, less of a sense of community that twitter/plurk (or my blog is just not that widely read and commented upon maybe) but they are still a social communication tool where you can read other people's ideas on topics that matter to you quickly and comment and establish a dialogue if you wish. That dialogue - this diatribe - is not chopped into 140 character segments, you can stop and read the whole thing if you wish. Or not, after skimming the first paragraph and deciding "So what."
Of course knowing that all your mates are asleep, or in the shower (together or just synchronously depends on the mates I guess!); killing time when you're bored at work; short snappy updates rather than 1,000+ word essays may be just what you want. Good luck to you, I'm not going to say you're wrong - but overall these things make them wrong for me and my situation. And, of course, in future that might change when I get a different job perhaps, or something else changes, but for the moment look for me haunting your blog and your comments, not your tweets and plurks.
Nicholas Carr wondered in The Atlantic magazine "Is Google making us stupid?" His line of reasoning is not quite the same as his title, but basically he says that Google is causing us to become shallow learners, able to quickly discover a fact, but at the cost of our ability and willingness to study more deeply and immerse ourselves in what we learn. Whilst this is a useful thing in many circumstances, it is a Bad Thing™.
Trent Batson, writing in Campus Technologyrefutes this argument. He argues that tools such as Google enable us to enter into a "hybrid orality" in which we bounce around the internet much like conversation ebbs and flows in a group and we learn from this in a style that is actually very ancient for us as a species, whilst being a change from how we've had to learn in the era dominated by the written (or printed) word.
Both these lines of reasoning have merit in my opinion. I very rarely do Aristolean logic OR thinking except when I'm programming these days. There is definitely merit, despite what Batson suggests, in stopping and focussing on one piece of writing for a while. Indeed, his own piece more or less demands it. I read quickly but it's still the effort of several minutes to read his 3 pages of ideas and arguments. This might not be the hours and days that Carr is missing and complaining about but it is, at the same time, far longer than the seconds that I (and I suspect most others) spend researching the google way. If you read pieces about designing good websites, they're talking about the 8 second rule namely you have 8 seconds during which to grab you audience and keep them so they will take a longer look if it's important. For example, 70% of visitor to my website for the last month last 30s or less. Rather encouragingly, over 17% last over 15 minutes, which I consider as a success.
Batson's piece also pre-supposes that we stop and chat about what we've learnt in a group, so that orality and group discussion enters into the learning process. I wonder how much that is true though. I was supporting a student documenting a database project yesterday. He had to draw Data Flow and Entity Relationship diagrams to a particular standard. It is a standard with which I am unfamiliar, so we looked it up on wikipedia, and found something that explained what was required. A success for the google way of learning! But, even between the student and I there was very little dialogue. We looked it up, checked it was the right method, and he drew the required diagrams. There was no exchange with the provider of the information (there could have been, but there wasn't). On another day I would have teased out the learning from the student and required him to at least attempt to vocalise it - but this was support on a critical document for an assignment due in the day before yesterday: although learning what the student had learnt is a useful part of what I do, getting the assignment completed and handed in a day late is better than getting it handed in 8 days late in terms of his ability to pass the course.
Without that group discussion, do we actually learn, or is it a temporary fix? I can remember what the conventions for DFDs are from yesterday, but I'm not sure I'll remember them by our next lesson, next week. Ironically, although it's not much of a dialogue at the moment, recalling looking them up yesterday is doing a gentle form of reinforcement so maybe writing this blog will help me remember them for next week! And that's part of the point. If I look up a fact, pass it from eye to hand as I write the answer into whatever it needs to be in, and then move on to the next thing, do I really learn it? There are people (sweeping generalisation says mostly men) that acquire and retain such random facts, but it's certainly fair to say that's not all of us. The "Hybrid Orality" is missing, because there's no discussion, it's a response to a question, forget it and move it on to the next fact.
If we actually, as groups, indulged in discussions of what we've just picked up, I'm sure we'd retain the information better. We would possibly also learn to see many sides of an argument and would indulge in some level of deeper learning too - although looking up the definition of the Weber (which I remember doing with a different student some weeks ago, although I don't remember the answer now, save it's to do with magnetism) doesn't necessarily lead to a lot of discussion because it's hard fact and not really open to a lot of debate.
The other thing that strikes me about the hybrid orality argument is that it assumes oral communication is all cooperative, communal and learning comes from that. Whilst I absolutely agree that organising your thoughts so you can articulate them is a part of learning, and an essential part of learning in fact (not just so you can pass the tests either), if you look at written reports of oral cultures, conversation isn't necessarily the learning mode - although it might be the consolidation mode of learning, but students that learnt from books still had conversations and did that consolidation too. What is the role of the bard, the skald and the like? They performed (recited, sang, chanted etc.) their content in a fashion that, actually, the lecturer would recognise rather more than the seminar facilitator. I don't know what the breakdown of the learning between the modes was, but concentrating on what the authority figure is telling you rather than conversing is certainly an element of learning that seems to predate the written word - writing replaced the need for the authority to travel, not the way that we learnt.
Is Google making us stupider? No. But is it changing the way we learn, making it shallower? The argument there is rather more veering towards "yes" at least on average and in my opinion. Is that a good thing? Well, although that's a whole new debate, it's not always a bad thing - it meant that yesterday I could help my student with a piece of his work that was causing him problems from my position of being an expert in supporting his learning rather than having to be an expert in his subject for example. But, at some point we need deep learners and thinkers don't we? I know not all places do PhDs in the same way, but the change from a (without false modesty) good undergraduate getting a first class honours degree to a PhD student facing researching the same problem for the next three years was a shock to me. And I was and, certainly more than most 18 year olds I know, still am of a book-reading frame of mind. I value the ability to learn facts, but I value too the ability to analyse, combine, and synthesise among what I know and I'm not sure that learning via Google really encourages that, does it?
Contrary to appearances and what some would have you believe, we live in a rather conservative world.
Since the industrial revolution, the how of the working life of most of us hasn't really changed. We get up, we travel to work at the company's site or occasionally at some other site, we work usually in a more-or-less communal setting all day, we travel home, we take what entertainment and news we're offered through a controlled and limited system, we go to sleep, rinse and repeat tomorrow.
It's tempting to liken the rattle of keys as we type to the rattle of the spindles through the looms in those "dark, Satanic mills" and whilst that's stretching things a bit too far, it's not entirely unfair either.
Now, granted, the nature of the work we do has changed: most of us type now, or scan barcodes or similar, whilst 100 years ago the vast majority did manual work. We notionally have equal rites regardless of gender, ethnicity etc. and whilst I don't think anyone actually believes we're there yet, we're a lot closer than we were 100 years, or even 40 years ago. Some countries have universal health care, most countries have some form of legislation to protect the work-force so children sweeping chimneys and dying at 25 of skin cancer is a distant memory in the first world at least.
The question is really why do we still work, and get entertained, that way?
I work, as I blog, happily with a variety of people from around the world. I've never met Doug from Ohio, nor Beth from Connecticut, not even Graham from Liverpool who lives close enough for me to have conveniently met him, but I have worked successfully and happily with all three. I've done support work with a student currently living in South Wales for 2.5 years and never met her - in that time I've also done support work face-to-face, and some contracting work face-to-face as well. That doesn't mostly get blogged about because it usually doesn't tie in to what I largely blog about here. I've knowingly met two Second Life friends in the flesh, and although we've occasionally helped each other out with problems, we've never really worked together.
Now, you might claim my situation is unusual, very unusual even. But just stop and ask yourself how much of what you do couldn't be done from home over a good internet connection? I rather suspect the answer is quite a lot of it. Play with data - filling in electronic forms, filing etc? You can do that from home. Spend a lot of time in meetings and travelling between them? Second Life, Skype etc. could fill a big chunk of your needs. Are you a coder? Do you really need to travel into the office to do that every day? The list of jobs that you could do from home is quite long, if you were allowed.
This won't suit everyone, not even everyone for all situations: whilst we will insist on going out to shop, we need people to actually load the shelves, deliver the goods and the like. Even if we shop over the internet (you mean you've never bought from Amazon?!) you still need someone to pick your books off the shelf, put them in a box and into the post, and you need the delivery people to do the deliveries. There are, even in my jaundiced view of meetings and their utility, meetings that are successful and part of that success is based on the personal interactions, the "chemistry" of face-to-face. If you're going to demonstrate the latest immersive experience (unless it's an immersive virtual environment such as good ones in Second Life) then I probably need to be there to be immersed: I remember a movie that had smell cards for example. I want to watch that in the cinema, with the card and to see how well (or badly given it only happened once) it works. However, there are, in my opinion, far more meetings that aren't useful or productive. But if you save yourself the time, costs and energy of travelling to those bad meetings can you feel better about the time you do waste in them? If you don't do meetings regularly but can (if allowed) work from home, what do you, and the others gain?
Let's say half the workforce (and I think the proportion would be much higher) stays at home on any given day. Traffic congestion falls, with a bit of juggling office buildings get smaller and use less power, water etc. How long each day you spend travelling to and from work? You reclaim all that time to do other things, and you reclaim the frustrations of all that travel too. Because the roads are less congested you also help those who must travel too.
The bosses tend to throw up their hands and say "OMG, the workforce will never work like that! How do we supervise them?" Actually, I want to know, how do you judge if your workforce is working well anyway? Most bosses don't expect their staff to work in absolute silence and isolation. They may have some idea of how much people are goofing off because they can see them, but they largely use other metrics - number of tasks successfully completed in a day for example - to determine whether you're working suitably hard or not. If your office-based work means you complete 50 tasks per day, and you work from home and achieve those 50 tasks per day, does it matter if that takes you 1 hour or 10? Not, in most circumstances, to your boss I bet. If it's critical that everything is done by 3pm for some reason, then they essentially trust you in the office to do that, why can't they trust you at home? They can fairly quickly see that you're not making it on a regular basis and take steps to address that after all. There is a movement around for a "progress log" that is filled in daily - it's not only Linden Lab that uses this, although they famously do too. Can't you fill in your log and email it to your boss? Or even make a private blog that you boss reads via RSS?
Surely both sides win with this? Some will protest that piecework isn't a great way to work, and that's often true - but the majority of good tools (those with a decent measure of outcomes rather than an impression) you use to judge if people are working well can be adapted to work for people you can't see just as well.
Entertainment is just as bad. Living in the UK I get the range of UK-made TV. Some are as excellent. Some strike me as terrible. Some are in the middle. I also get a selection of TV from other countries: mostly the US, but also Australia and occasionally India, New Zealand etc. Other people choose for me, if I'm good and limit myself to what's on offer on the TV. They both limit and control what I can see.
Of course some people, with a fine disregard for copyright law, record their TV and put it up as bit-torrents and the like so I can, in theory, download it and watch it at my convenience. In practise I have only done this once - I like TV on a bigger screen than my monitor and sitting further away from it is the main reason though, rather than any automatic respect for the law. The only time I did this was when a TV station decided I didn't really want to see Season 5 of a show that I loved. It wasn't a great show, it probably deserved to be axed from the schedules, but regardless of its merits or otherwise, I enjoyed it. They wouldn't let me watch it, so I downloaded and watched it anyway. I don't know how much the TV companies take per person per show, from those companies that do make a profit, but I'd be surprised if it was as much as US$1. I'd be surprised if it was much less than US$0.01 per person though. Obviously, on commercial TV, those takings are advertising revenue. Profits will be lower, because you have to pay all those pesky actors, crew etc. too naturally. But, let's say they take $1/person. If they let me choose to access, quite legally, their material for $1.10 (to cover the costs of the storage space, access charges, bandwidth etc.) or even the $1.99 that the Apple Store charges why not? I have channels on my cable TV that I never watch. I have a couple that I watch for one or two shows and that's it. And then I have some favourites that I watch often. If they give me proper control and choice, I will have (thank you very much) a small number of channels I will happily pay a monthly fee to (as I already do with my cable subscription), on the basis that I watch quite a lot of their shows. I will have an "Eloise's On Demand" channel if you like - where I essentially buy the shows piecemeal from my supplier, so I can watch CSI the day after its US broadcast, or even simultaneously with its US broadcast assuming I make the decision that paying $24.20 (that's 22 X $1.10 if you're not keeping up) for rapid CSI Season 9 is worth it. (I might not mind: in the UK I can see CSI week-by-week continuously without the annoying breaks in the schedule that the US market has to suffer.) Although I rather plucked the $1 value from thin air, with some idea of the $1.99 at the Apple Store, Off the Shelf News costs making ER and estimates around $0.80 per viewer as the revenue from advertising.
I can keep going: although the slogan "Information wants to be free" is nonsense at one level - information has no wants after all - whatever your stance on "hippy techie wiki economics" (to quote one of the more vocal detractors that I know), information is becoming free. Google as a search engine (rather than via knol) and wikipedia are gradually filling up the free information market. Google makes its money via advertising, wikipedia via donations, but they are both essentially free at the point of demand. Last week I was invigilating an exam and reading a book whilst the students sweated away (at least mentally). The book I was reading had a number of unusual words I wanted to look up, so out with the iPhone and off to Google. A click later and I was at Merriam-Webster's online dictionary which has an iPhone style sheet to make it easy to use. Wonderful! Three words later it's saying I've used my commitment-free allocation, and do I want to sign up for the trial of their paying service? No! Back to google, and off to dictionary.com - where the information is available and free thank you. It's not as convenient - I have to scroll past the sponsor's message, then zoom the screen in, but for the odd word every now and again, free and taking a couple of extra seconds to find the answer is just fine thanks. Open Notebook Science is starting to chip away at the monopoly of the paid, peer-reviewed journal. It's not there yet, but the information is starting to be free that way. (Actually, I think both system have merits, and what we need is people using both, and the journals changing so they will take material a paper for peer-review that has been included in the open notebook format. There is merit to both reading the entire lab-book if you are interested, certainly to find "failing" routes, as well as reading a well-written paper or review.) What is quite scary is how quickly material from a peer-reviewed journal appears on wikipedia. A few months ago I was reading a paper in Nature, which had been on the shelves for a few hours at the time. There was some background that they referred to in the paper where I was a little hazy, so off to wikipedia... Imagine my surprise when I not only found the information I was after (not that surprising) but found that the page on wikipedia had been updated on the basis of the paper that I was currently reading!
And I'm deliberately avoiding discussing the revolutions in education - that could form a 10,000 word rant all on it's own, and at 2,000 words this is quite long enough!
The precursors for the information revolution are there. The questions remain though:
How long will it take before the revolution really hits?
How rough will it be when it does come (remember the Luddites? The industrial revolution certainly hurt some)?
Does burying our head in the sand about this as about so many uncomfortable issues make any kind of sense?
It's hopefully not a surprise to most of you that a lot of people involved in the education process are saying it desperately needs to change. It doesn't matter which side of the Atlantic you're on, nor even which side of the Pacific, the development of Web 2.0 tools, the rise of mobile computing and their ilk are all contributing to the pressure for teaching to change.
In the last few days a couple of interesting thoughts have crossed my RSS habits, that seem to fit comfortably together here.
Clark Aldrich asks are books white bread for the mind? His thesis is simple at first thought, but still has me pondering the ramifications. Books take knowledge, information, ideas, interactions and more and organise them nicely into chunks, plots, chapters, stories, developing themes and the like. You can find, possibly with a little effort, but often with next to none one or more books that relate almost directly to any situation you are in, or any data you need. The problem comes when you need to apply that information or that solution. Books usually fail to give you context, discuss alternative strategies, let you explore the risks and rewards attendant on their actions and the like.
Consider... you find out you are unexpectedly pregnant. There are millions of books and films that will suggest a course of action, but which is right for you? Which of the storylines will give you the best resolution? And remember of course, in fiction, there's usually a happy ending. At the same time you can equally large amounts of data about risks, implications of being a single parent, teen pregnancy and so on, but how do they apply to you?
Unsurprisingly to those of you that know of his ideas and career, he suggests that well designed games and simulations can get the information across at least as well, but they can also let you explore in safety the ramifications of your choices, giving you a better context to apply the knowledge that you gain - and this knowledge will include the hard data, but can also include strategies and ideas for the social interactions that go with it.
Scott McLeod has blogged a quote from a book called The Game of School. The quote basically asks why we take children and their energy, enthusiasm and curiosity and force them to sit down and learn the dry facts that we think are important.
Again the implications of this (and the book is on order) are interesting - and are about putting the control of the learning and the ability to learn the facts and the context back in the hands of the learner. Rather than giving them the dry facts, let them explore - I strongly suspect with guidance - and learn the implications for their choices and that facts aren't dry things without a life.
It's not really heady stuff from where I'm sitting, although I can imagine all kinds of people that I know squirming very uncomfortably, but the education system is going to have to change and adapt - it has a choice whether it's stepwise and controlled or revolutionary. I can see pros and cons for each, but I don't think books and schools are all bad, and a revolution is likely to through the baby out with the bathwater don't you think?
You may or may not recognise the picture to the right. It's one of the latest Facebook crazes, Restaurant City, in which you run a restaurant and try to balance customer service, profit, keeping your workforce happy, designing the interior of the restaurant and somewhere in there, there's meant to be some fun too.
Solvr is a fairly interesting tool that lets you structure problem solving, and share it around. It's not ultimately secure (it's a random URL, but that's it), and the site warns that it's in alpha development and prone to crashing, but I didn't have any problems when using it for a couple of projects.
Over to the right is Eloise in Metaplace. Avatar customisation is risible in terms of the options, but much easier than Second Life. You can choose male or female, you can choose one of about a dozen hair-styles, a dozen tops, a dozen bottoms (skirts/trousers and shoes all in one), and you can play with the colours a bit - from a limited palette which, incidentally, will stop you being a real blonde or a real red-head if you wish to be, but green hair and blue skin is quite easy. Not necessarily the right shade of either though!
It's reasonably easy to build - you can see next to me the inevitable puppy that one tutorial takes you through rezzing, and a tinted street light I built to test that out. You can also see the pool of light next to it - but although I managed to colour the light, I couldn't make the pool of light bigger despite options that seemed should do this. Mind you, as you can see from the next picture, trying to make an object link to a website other than metaplace proved to not work. I set my homepage up as the target and when I click on the object, it's forgotten the behaviour I set and tries to open metaplace... The process is actually not really any easier than editing a well-crafted llLoadURL script, and at least the load URL script works reliably!
In the comments to a post a few days ago someone asked me if I was still using my Twitter account. I said no, and that I might explain why sometime soon. So here I am.
