This blog is constructed using 100% recycled electrons.
Just thought you’d like to know.
Twitterphobia and the mainstream media
Yesterday, the Greater Manchester police service implemented a brilliant idea — to log on Twitter every call they received over a 24-hour period. The Chief Constable, Peter Fahy, explained that he wanted
to use the experiment to demonstrate that only a third of the incidents reported are genuine crimes, with two thirds being ‘social work’ concerning incidents such as alcohol-related disturbances, relationship disputes and mental health issues.
Fahy told The Manchester Evening News, which is aggregating the tweets on its website: “This is not a gimmick. This is a genuine attempt to show people 24 hours of policing work. Crime is only one part but an important part of what we do.”
IMHO, the experiment was a brilliant success. It highlighted the amazing range of things that the police service is called upon to do, and made that point more forcefully than any official speech by a senior officer or Home Secretary could do.
But guess what? Some sections of the UK mainstream media — press and radio — spent the day carping about an alleged “waste” of police resources. Shouldn’t Manchester bobbies be out arresting criminals rather than sitting in an office “tweeting”? (Funny how that word can be used as a sneer. On the ‘Today’ programme, John Humphreys — Britain’s Technophobe-in-Chief — described tweets as “tiny Internet telephone messages”.) In fact, the tweets were done by two members of the Manchester force’s media department. But it’s interesting to see how unacknowledged bias (and technophobic snobbery) infects journalists who would bristle if one called them biased or partisan.
The public sector and the thin pipe problem
My mate Dave Briggs has an interesting blog post about the reasons why public-sector organisations refuse to allow their staffs to access the ‘normal’ Internet. Dave spends a lot of time in these organisations and knows them well. He has identified three different types of explanation.
1. Staff will waste time
“This” says Dave, “is a management issue and not a technology one. If people want to waste time, they’ll find a way; and every organisation already has policy and process to manage this and stop it happening”.
2. Information security and risk of virus infection etc
Dave sees two parts to this.
Firstly that using social web sites, whether for communication or collaboration, increases the likelihood of losing sensitive information. I’ve heard of people in councils being blocked from Slideshare for this very reason. Imagine that! Someone accidentally creating a powerpoint deck full of confidential data, and then deciding that they should publish it publicly on Slideshare!
This is unfathomably moronic, not least because of course there have been far more instances of people losing or leaking paper files, and nobody as far as I am aware has banned the use of those. It’s an education thing, innit?
Likewise the virus issue. People clicking dodgy links is the main problem here, and that’s as likely to happen via email as anything else. Nobody blocks email (shame). Instead, educate people not to click dodgy links. Easy.
Finally, he comes to what he thinks is the real reason:
3. The pipe isn’t big enough
“I have had lots of conversations with IT folk in public sector organisations”, he writes, “who simply state that if someone in the organisation watches a video on YouTube, then that’s the network down for pretty much everyone else”.
I can’t help but think that this is one of the main reasons behind organisations blocking access to interesting websites. Perhaps the other two reasons are just covering up the fact that many government organisations have infrastructure that really isn’t fit for purpose?
Yep.
Autumn Rose
Larger size here.
Marrgate
Apropos my earlier post about Andrew Marr’s extraordinary outburst at the Cheltenham Literary Festival…
I was genuinely puzzled by the outburst. If intelligent people suddenly do silly things, it’s generally for a reason. It could be that they’re drunk, or depressed, or tired — or just that they’ve been goaded beyond endurance and suddenly snapped. I wondered if Marr had had some terrible experience in Cyberspace. My first thought was that it might have something to do with the fact that he made the mistake of picking up an online rumour about Gordon Brown popping anti-depressants and then putting the question to the then Prime Minister live on prime-time TV.
Now (Wednesday) we’re beginning to find out what may have been behind the Cheltenham mindstorm. It seems that there was a backstory that he had succeeded in keeping out of the mainstream media for years by using Court injunctions. But somehow the news had leaked out via the Net. Guido Fawkes spills the beans and goes on to comment on the hypocrisy of the Westminster media elite:
Yesterday on the Today programme there was a discussion as to if the mainstream media would sit on a story that Guido would not. Sarah Montague dismissed the idea that there is in fact a cosy media elite. Well here is another story that everyone in the Westminster media knows yet won’t publish. It involves three household names; Jackie Ashley, the Guardian’s cheerleader-in-chief for the Brownies, Alice Miles of The Times, who cheers for the Cameroons and Andy Marr, Gordon Brown’s much favoured BBC interlocutor.
If this story was about soap stars, footballers or chart-toppers it would be all over the papers. If an actress on EastEnders had an affair with an actor on Coronation Street who was married to the star of Emmerdale which resulted in a love-child it would be front-page news on every newspaper. Yet Andy Marr fathering a child with Alice Miles whilst married to Jackie Ashley goes unreported. Across newsrooms, at Islington and Hampstead dinner parties it has been common knowledge for years. These three journalists are at the heart of the politico-media nexus that constitutes the new ruling class. The producers and editors who are the media gate-keepers would not be keen to dish the dirt on their own… despite the fact that it would be of huge interest to the public.
All very sordid. But at least it explains why Marr opened his mouth without first engaging his brain.
Amazon enters the Singles market
This is a really interesting development for anyone interested in long-form journalism.
Amazon issued a call today for “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length” for its e-book store.
Specifically, per Amazon’s guidelines, that means non-fiction works in the 10,000-30,000-word (30 to 90-page) range that deliver a well-researched and thoughtfully executed argument related to business, politics, science, history, current events or other topics in the field of intellectual discourse.
Qualifying works will be labeled as “Kindle Singles” and sold in a corresponding section in the Kindle Store for “much less than a typical book.”
“Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format,” said VP of Kindle Content Russ Grandinetti in a statement. “With Kindle Singles, we’re reaching out to publishers and accomplished writers and we’re excited to see what they create.”
The Kindle Singles category seems like the perfect place to offer individual copies of works that typically wind up in anthologies — historical and contemporary essays on political theory and philosophy, for instance — that are simply too short to be bound individually, but too important not to be in circulation. The section could easily take aim at the education market by allowing students to forgo the purchase of course readers and unwieldy anthologies — often peppered with works that never become part of the course material — and provide additional visibility for “accomplished” self-published writers of non-fiction.
The idea of a university: the ConDem version
For Russell Group, read Ivy League.
Here’s the current cost of attending Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, the smallest of the US Ivy League schools.
And here’s the level of support offered by this (very rich) institution:
So if you’re an average student receiving average support, your college bill is $20,220 — or £12,792 in real money.
Which is probably about what Oxbridge will want to charge. Trebles all round in the Bullingdon Club, eh?
Open learning, traditional universities and slash-and-burn agriculture
There’s an interesting piece in Times Higher Education under the headline “Universities are blind to open-learning train set to smash up their models”. It’s a report on a OECD conference held last week in Paris.
Open learning and new technology are about to smash the structure of the modern university – and higher education is too distracted by its funding problems to notice.
Peter Smith, the senior vice-president of academic strategies and development for private US firm Kaplan Higher Education, said online access to university courses would end the model of higher education based on ‘scarcity’ of places.
“Faculty and people who run universities are no longer in control,” he told an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development conference in Paris last week.
Dr Smith, a former assistant director general for education at Unesco, the UN cultural and educational body, challenged the focus on the financial crisis at the event, titled Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More with Less.
Given huge growth in access to information, Dr Smith argued, the real challenge facing universities is “doing more with more”. He added: “The only ‘less’ is the resources available to traditional universities to do what they have always done.”
In another speech, Charles Reed, the chancellor of the California State University system, likened higher education to a train, with more people seeking to cram into limited places as the financial crisis squeezed jobs.
Dr Smith adapted the metaphor. “The train is headed directly at the modern university structure,” he said. “It is going to hit it, and change it fundamentally.”
Dr Smith said he could, for example, take Carnegie Mellon University’s open-learning courses on Apple iTunes, develop a system of mentors and use the OECD’s measures to evaluate student performance on graduation (the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project).
This would give “all of the resources you need for an excellent educational experience” at a low cost, he argued.
What’s interesting about this is its implicit short-termism. There’s no doubt that it can be done — and probably is being done. Leaving aside the question of whether there is an important — but intangible — value to be derived from physically gathering young people in one place so that they can learn from one another as well as from their ‘instructors’ (a hoary old question, this, first raised by Eli Noam in 1995), this view of education seems to me to be irredeemably flawed. The whole point of academic teaching is that, over time, it needs to be refreshed, updated, renewed — and in some cases overthrown by new paradigms and new knowledge. Building a degree-awarding industry on the back of open content provided by established institutions can indeed be done. But it contributes nothing to the process of academic renewal that comes mainly from employing, supporting and rewarding academic staff. In that sense, Smith’s idea of re-using CMU material looks awfully like the slash-and-burn approach to agriculture that is devastating the world’s rain-forests. In the short-term, the cleared forest soil is fertile and productive. But if it’s not fertilised and tilled it will rapidly become exhausted.
LATER: In a tweet, Jeff Jarvis pointed out, reasonably, that Dr Smith was proposing to add some value (mentors, etc.). But that still doesn’t address the issue of who generates — and refreshes — the teaching material. I suppose it’s possible in some cases that the act of exposing teaching materials to a wide audience could lead to an open-source-type tinkering, bug-fixing improvement process.
Why e-books are a weight off my mind (and on my conscience)
Last Sunday’s Observer column.
When the history of e-reading technology comes to be written, an Irishman named Michael O'Leary will be assigned a small but significant role in the story. This is not because the chief executive of Ryanair has a secret life as a geek, but simply because he has perfected a system for squeezing his customers until their pips squeak. And therein lies the tale…
Registering errors
From The Register.
On Wednesday, 6 October, we reported that a Wikipedia admin, RodHullandEmu, had added erroneous information to the Wikipedia entry on Norman Wisdom. In a revised version of the story we reported that RodHullandEmu had not added the erroneous information, but had "preserved" it. We accept that both of these statements are incorrect, and apologise for any inconvenience or embarrassment caused.
Curiouser and curiouser.