Month: October 2012

Open Badges, Clay Shirky, and the tipping point.

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Doug Belshaw

The great thing about thinkers such as Clay Shirky is that they can put into pithy, concise quotations things that remain latent in our collective thinking. You know, things like:

We’ve reached an age where this stuff is technologically boring enough to be socially interesting.

I first used that quote in a post four years ago when I called for technology to be so commonplace and ubiquitous that it’s not considered a thing distinct from human interaction. Technology should be woven into the fabric of our identities not something set apart, alien and ‘other’.

Four years ago social networks weren’t woven into society the way they are now. Nowadays, of course, hashtags accompany the opening credits to television shows so that they can be discussed in a ‘channel’ on Twitter, it’s entirely normal to whip your mobile device when standing in a queue (instead of talking about the weather to a stranger), and you’d be shocked if brands didn’t encourage you to follow them on Facebook.

One way to explain this is through Clay Shirky’s lens: these things are now socially boring enough to be socially interesting. You can assume that almost the man or woman on the street knows what Facebook, Twitter and mobile devices are for without having to explain them first. That means we can talk about the next layer up- i.e. what we do with those tools.

Open Badges are still quite technologically interesting. There’s several aspects of them that the average person wouldn’t understand without having it explained. For example:

What metadata is
How an Open Badges consists of ‘baking’ metadata into an image
That anyone can host a badge backpack because it’s Open Source software
What is means that the various badge backpacks will be ‘federated’

Now, we could go about a mass education program and (relatively speaking) spend a lot of money helping people to learn about these things. But that’s not how things reach a tipping point. The way people become proficient with tools like social networks or Open Badges is because they scratch an itch (solve a problem) or because there’s a ‘hook’ interesting enough for them to be dragged, Alice in Wonderland-like into a deep rabbit-hole where they can find out more.

So in a UK context, Stephen Fry’s 2009 video interview where he explained his love of Twitter in layman’s terms meant that many people were provided a hook. In fact, this is how advertising and celebrity endorsement works: “I like Person X, and Person X likes Thing Y, so therefore I should find out more about Thing Y.” With Facebook, it was an itch to be scratched: when you’re excluded from a conversation because you’re not using a particular social network, then there’s a powerful incentive to join the tribe. Especially as the nominal cost of entry is ‘free’ and the difficulty level is ‘super easy’.

What we need with Open Badges, and which we’ll certainly have by early 2013, are compelling examples of how they can be used in education and other contexts. At the same time we’re working on ways to make ‘onboarding’ easier for issuers, displayers and endorsers. We’re also working on the UX and UI for badge earners. In other words, we’re ready for badges to be huge next year.

Watch this space. 🙂

Image CC BY Joi

Because obviously I’m a male chauvinist pig.

Posted on October 11, 2012August 25, 2019 by Doug Belshaw

Update: I feel like I’ve grown a lot since writing this angry post. I don’t feel like I’m the same person that wrote this, but have kept it up as an example of how sometimes I get things very wrong.

Last week I keynoted the DeFT OER dissemination conference. I enjoyed the event, received good feedback afterwards and thought it was well-received. Certainly no-one raised any major issues either in the opportunities for question-and-answer, nor during the rest of the day when I was visible and around to talk to those in the audience.

That’s why this blog post (on the official JISC-funded project blog) caught me by surprise. Now, I know that what I probably should do is ignore or perhaps downplay it. But I’m not going to, because I’m actually outraged that the author feels like she can get away with misrepresenting me in this way. You can find out what I actually said (I recorded it) by going to my conference blog.

I now have the ‘my mother test’. My mother reached the grand old age of sixty a few months ago and now if I can explain it to my mother, then I think that the average person can understand it. So I thought how could I explain ‘openness’ to my mother in a way that she could understand? Because ‘Open Educational Resources’ is kind of a supply-side term.

Note that I equate my mother with ‘the average person’. The author fails to quote me at any time in the post, claiming that I’ve ‘dissed’ my elders (particularly my mother). Why, she wonders, did I use a female example here?

I’ll tell you why.

I used my grandmother as an example of a digital refusnik because both my grandfathers died before I was five, and she’s the only person of that generation that I know well enough to comment upon. I used my mother as an example not because she’s female but because my father has perhaps slightly more advanced skills than others of that generation. I also showed a video at one point showing the (male) rapper DMX as an example of someone who’s less than digitally literate. But he’s black, so presumably I’m a racist as well as a misogynist.

Using the not-so-subtle device of rhetorical questioning the post goes on to ask whether it was fair that I implied that my mother was intellectually challenged. Really? Is this not just a case of someone getting on their hobby horse and riding it off into the distance (whilst I’m left stranded on a scapegoat)? I’m genuinely shocked that, if they felt so strongly about the issue, they didn’t raise it with me on the day.

So I’m not overly-deferent to my elders. So I don’t venerate academia. So I don’t engage in hand-wringing over the gender of the examples I give.

So what?

A #shoffice update (October 2012)

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Doug Belshaw

Back in August I posted about how working from home with my new job for the Mozilla Foundation means I needed a dedicated office. It’s just too distracting working in the main house when we’ve got two young children! I’m calling it a ‘shoffice’ as it’s a shed as far as planning regulations go (no-one’s sleeping in there) but an office as far as I’m concerned. 🙂

Since August local architect Mark Starford has been drawing up draft plans from the detailed measurements he took on that sunny day. I’m delighted Mark’s agreed to allow me to share the drawings here (and on Flickr) under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. I’ve also introduced him to the delights of Pinterest via my Architecture & Design board. It’s useful to have a ‘mood board’ as it allows others to see the kinds of things you like by referencing extant things!

Below are the options Hannah, my wife, and I like so far. Mark gave us three options for the path and way down to the office. I’ve included the ‘dogleg’ version. We’re not so keen on the protruding skylight but are definitely in favour of getting as much north-facing light in as possible. Mark informed us that artists tend to favour this kind of light as it’s more constant and avoids the ‘hard light’ that distracts me when I work.

We definitely like the freestanding canopy-style protruding roof to shelter the stairs and we’re also thinking about potentially including an additional way to get down to the decking area. Hannah doesn’t want the decking to be my ‘outside office space’ and I can see her point. We’re also still thinking about the placement and shape of the windows to the west side (we don’t want any on the south side).

You can click on any of the images to enlarge them or the set is here:

If you’re struggling to understand how this works, it might help to know that our garden would be pretty much on a 45-degree slope if it wasn’t for a concrete ‘bunker’ under the patio. Also, the fence to the rear of our property drops down dramatically to a much lower garden level for our neighbours.

The images below may help:

And, finally, we’re absolutely going to invite our neighbours (to the side and the back) to look at the final drawings. We’re trying to make it so they hardly notice it’s there!