Month: March 2020

Email is the original robust, decentralised technology

Posted on March 14, 2020March 14, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

I don’t know about you, but this pandemic has led to my inbox being full of messages from companies telling me about the steps they’re taking to ensure business continuity. It’s like the GDPR never happened. 🙄

However, let’s just examine how these companies are conveying this mission-critical information? Is it some sexy new platform? Have they taken out adverts? Nope, they’re using email.

Email is the original robust, decentralised technology. It’s built on open standards. It’s free. You can do almost anything with it,. This is why, despite Silicon Valley trying to come up with alternatives, email refuses to ‘die’. It’s just too useful.

People used to complain about email and the flood of messages in their inbox. But that’s nothing compared to the hundreds (or even thousands!) of messages you can be bombarded with if your organisation uses a workplace chat app. You don’t solve a problem just by throwing new shiny tech at it.

I remember Malcolm Gladwell mentioning years ago in The New Yorker that if paper had been invented recently, we’d be talking about its “tangible” qualities and how “spatially flexible” it is. Same goes with email: we forget how awesome it is because it’s seen as boring and everyday.

But let’s just go through some of the things you can achieve with email:

Private messages
Group messages
Attachments
Encryption
Filter messages
Forward important information
Asynchronous
Lightweight and fast
Search
Read receipts

A few days ago, I posted about how to share educational resources using bittorrent. I reckon if you used that, email, and a decentralised video conferencing technology based on WebRTC (like Jitsi), you could achieve almost anything. Especially during an emergency.

I see that the #DisasterSocialism hashtag has been trending on social networks, which is certainly something we need instead of #DisasterCapitalism. If you and your organisation is disrupted by the pandemic, just get through the initial days with whatever you’ve got. And I can guarantee you’ve already got email.

Further reading? There’s a list of decentralised applications (mostly newer tech) here.

How to easily share educational resources via bittorrent

Posted on March 12, 2020March 12, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

MoodleNet isn’t exactly my first foray into the world of Open Educational Resource (OER) sharing. I can’t believe that it’s now 17 years since I was, as a fresh-faced teacher, first involved in a European project around using bittorrent to share educational resources.

I feel like the global pandemic has helped sharpen our collective minds as open educators and edtech enthusiasts. It’s certainly made me realise that we should be using torrents to share resources. After all, the more people are ‘seeding’, the less it puts strain on the bandwidth at any one location!

The great thing about bittorrent is that it’s a mature decentralised technology. There’s lots of ways of achieving the same ends, but I want to show perhaps the quickest and easiest way of getting openly-licensed educational content added to a torrent that you can then share with others.

How does bittorrent work?

You don’t need to understand how it works to use it, any more than you need to know how encryption works to shop or bank online. But in case you’re interested…

Setup

Make sure you’ve got some openly-licensed content. If you don’t have any of your own to share, you can find some at OER Commons or via this list.

Also, you will need a bittorrent app, like Transmission (alternatives here)

Uploading

Create a free account at the Internet Archive. Here’s a direct link to the signup page.

Go to the upload page:

Press the green button to get to this page:

Fill in the required fields to provide more information about the files to be uploaded. Then press the blue button to continue:

Downloading

Once the files have been uploaded, you (and everyone else on the web) will see a screen similar to this one. There’s some additional processing to take place, but you should be able to see ‘torrent’ in the right-hand sidebar:

If you click to download the torrent, you should see something like this. While you may download the torrent to your computer, you can also just choose to open it directly in your bittorrent app:

The torrent is added to the bittorrent app. As you can see, the Internet Archive has auto-converted my original upload into other formats. You can choose to download all files (default) or choose some to skip:

Here is the torrent about to start downloading to your machine. If you leave the bittorrent app running, you provide an additional node to ‘seed’ the files to others!

Conclusion

As you can see from the above, creating a torrent from files you already have (or can find!) is pretty straightforward.

The huge value of doing this via the Internet Archive is that they will always be seeding your torrent. This means there will never be a time when someone tries to download your torrent and there’s no seeds.

What could I do to improve this quick guide? Do you have any questions? Ask in the comments below!

Weeknote 10/2020

Posted on March 7, 2020March 7, 2020 by Doug Belshaw

I’m writing this on the train from Hasselt to Bruges in Belgium, travelling with my wife after speaking at the Open Belgium conference yesterday. My presentation on behalf of the co-op was on Open initiatives need open organizations. It’s Open Education week, so on Wednesday I presented on MoodleNet as part of an EDEN Webinar on open technologies.

We weren’t entirely sure whether our trip to Belgium would go ahead, what with all of the media coverage of the coronavirus. However, the scaremongering online and in newspapers bears no comparison to the reality on the ground when flying and visiting other countries. It’s all very well being cautious, but I don’t want to put my life on hold on the small chance that I’ll be infected. I can however, see the secret delight on my wife’s face when she (a closet germophobe) gets to disinfect all of the surfaces on trains, planes, etc. without me rolling my eyes.

A follow-up visit to the optician’s this week confirmed that the blepharitis that was affecting my right eye has pretty much gone. That means I’m back to wearing contact lenses, apart from on days that I get migraines.

For some reason I’ve had three migraines this week, which may or may not be connected to me giving up refined sugar and alcohol for Lent. I’m testing out that theory by suspending my commitment while travelling — meaning I can eat all of the waffles and chocolates, and quaff all of the Belgian beer I want. But for this weekend only, of course. I did lose almost half a stone this week, so I’m fully expecting to put all of that back on…

I wrote an article for Thought Shrapnel for the first time in three weeks, which kind of tumbled out of me. They’re the ones I enjoy writing the most: I’m struck by an idea, then I sit down to write and it all comes out in one go, with minimal editing. This one was (literally) full of questions.

Other times, it takes forever to write an article; I’ll have several ‘stubs’ on the go, and sometimes they turn into something and sometimes they don’t. Writing is a pretty mysterious process to me. People often ask me for advice, but I’m not sure I’ve got much other than ensuring you’re (a) reading a lot, and (b) writing a lot. In my experience, the more you read, the more you end up writing.

In addition to this week’s article, I provided the usual link roundup. This week it included everything from digital credentials through to survival, with a bit of panpsychism thrown in for good measure.

Given all of the coronavirus stuff, the reductions in overall travel, and the increase in the number of people working at least part of the time from home, I should probably write something about remote work.

Unrelated to the outbreak, my Moodle colleagues in Perth, Australia, had almost a month’s gap between moving out of their previous office and moving into the new one. As a result, they had a taste of what it’s like for us fully-remote workers. Holly, who leads the People & Culture team, wrote up their findings, with which I’d certainly concur.

Changes happen first slowly, and then quickly. That’s why, when I was a History teacher, I ensured students understood the long-term causes of events, and not just their short-term trigger. Remote work and home working is a long-term trend over the last decade (at least), and I think that the short-term trigger of events like the coronavirus will only serve to accelerate it.

Next week, I’ve got a couple of presentations to Moodle Partners and the Moodle User Association. They’re keen to see the progress we’ve made on MoodleNet. Other than that, I’ve got some onboarding to the work that We Are Open is doing with Greenpeace, and the usual chivvying, cajoling, and smiling-while-prodding-people that constitutes much of my working life these days.

Header image: street art in Hasselt, Belgium